


Reliquary

by George_Pushdragon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-22
Updated: 2011-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:15:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 100,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24108850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/George_Pushdragon/pseuds/George_Pushdragon
Summary: In a rapidly modernising world, Lucius has become an antique. As it turns out, Harry is a collector.
Relationships: Lucius Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 5
Kudos: 29





	1. Reliquary

**Author's Note:**

> My eternal thanks to djin7, who was a fabulous beta and gave this story exactly what it needed.

Lucius Malfoy had always had a gift for concealment. The hood of his most spartan cloak obscured his distinctive profile and, beneath it, his hair was tightly bound. Resisting his naturally purposeful pace and the momentum of his errand's urgency, he forced his steps to be easy and slow. He did what he could to look ordinary.

Even so, he had not gone more than a hundred yards from the Floo point in the post office, taking the winding path that ran around the back of the Hogsmeade high road and avoided public view, when an unwelcome grey-cloaked figure appeared on the path behind him. Lucius pressed on at the same leisurely speed. An assailant could have as many masters as Lucius had enemies. The Ministry, perhaps. The vigilante Muggle-lovers for whom victory had not ended the war and who now ensured that people like Lucius walked the streets cautiously, if they dared leave the sanctuary of their homes at all. It might even be one of the more brutal factions among the feuding remnants of the Death Eaters, avenging Lucius's aloofness from their old cause. 

Whoever it was, he was gaining ground and among the more retributive of Lucius's parole conditions was the prohibition on laying hands on a wand. Lucius slipped off the path into a birch grove, treading loudly, quickly disappearing among the young green boughs. It was somewhat naive of the Ministry to assume that unarmed was synonymous with defenceless.

Approaching warily, with a telltale break in his footsteps at the moment he drew his wand, his pursuer flinched as Lucius swung out. His horrified eyes locked on the crooked length of wood in Lucius's fist. He was, after all, only a boy, scarcely out of school by the looks of him. 

_"Crucio!"_

Lucius uttered that dread word with chilling conviction, and its power undid the boy's self-control. For one paralysed instant, he shuddered on weak knees with his right hand losing its grip on his wand as he braced himself for the pain. Terror and the wet leaves underfoot made him an effortless target. Dropping his false wand and snatching the real one, Lucius knocked the boy down and towered over him. 

"Who sent you?" he asked calmly and directed the boy's wand at his heart. "Open your mouth if you wish to live."

The boy's lips pressed together, white and trembling. His face reflected all the horrors he imagined that Lucius Malfoy would wreak on him, even five years out of practice and with an unfamiliar wand. He shook his head; or rather, his head shook. 

That was all Lucius needed. This trembling-lipped amateur was no servant of the Death Eaters, and even the Muggleborn vigilantes preferred thugs to effete schoolboys. He was almost certainly on his first job for the Ministry. Which meant Lucius's presence here had been anticipated but not deeply feared. Which told him that his contact was most likely compromised. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket. When he spat into it, it emitted an ugly yellow mist. He held it over the boy's mouth until, eyes bulging and legs twitching, he lost consciousness. Then he calmly folded the handkerchief, bound the boy to a tree-trunk with the tie from his robe, and continued briskly along the path back to the village. 

*

The rotten town's stench oozed out to meet him. Hot, dead fat and burning sugar; soot and piss and the discarded scraps of food going rancid in the gutters. The smell of too many human animals. These three years of peace had spawned Muggle daytrippers the way a pond spawns mosquitoes.

With his hood pulled low over his forehead, his view of the new Hogsmeade was mercifully blinkered. In the early evening gloom, the puddles on the high road reflected the piercing light of the neon signs that glowed ghoulishly, night and day, above the glass-fronted stores built over the rubble of the Three Broomsticks. On the stairs outside, a gang of teenage witches and wizards in Muggle sports shoes sprawled, and jeered at passers-by, and, judging by the litter of paper soft drink cups in which they sat, did nothing else. Next door, Madam Puddifoot’s looked like the relic it was - crushed like a faded paper parasol between the aromatherapy salon and the novelty electronics store. The enormous television screen in the front window of the business once known as Zonko's flashed in spiteful contrast to the grey faces of the wizards coming out of it, having placed their bets and lost, and passing, as they departed, the sleek motor car of the establishment's Muggle manager which squatted like a fat black cockroach on the pavement outside. 

Here and there, traces of roof thatch or age-sodden timber still showed through the acres of glass and metal, but the old buildings were strangled by their fatter, brasher new neighbours. And inside all the doors and windows glared that merciless Muggle electric light that skinned the mystery from everything. 

If there had been any of his youthful revolutionary fervour left in Lucius, the corruption of Hogsmeade would have killed it. There was simply nothing left worth saving. He skirted around a rubbish bin in a lawn of charred cigarette ends, discarded as if their owners had failed to distinguish any difference between the inside of the bin and the town around it. That first glimpse of Hogsmeade decided him. There was no choice but to stake everything on this last hazardous plan. This was not a world he intended to live in.

The alley he turned down sported decrepitude of a more welcome kind. Here was a place where progress would not dare to show its face. A haven and a hovel. The Hog's Head.

Inside the inn, the candles' filthy smoke obscured a view that was already shady. The twitching light was just enough to make out the ancient smears around the rims of the glasses. At least you could say this for the Hog's Head: as the rest of the world surrendered to the Muggle scourge, this far from noteworthy little inn and its proprietor became more defiantly wizardly. There was no neon here. No poisonous fumes of plastic. Under all their dust and tarnish, the fittings were brass and the wall panels oak, and the cobwebs that reached down from the roof corners like malevolent vines hid fine cornices and stained glass that once had thrown blue and gold stars across the floorboards.

When he took a seat in the corner, his contact was already one minute late, if indeed he was coming at all.

As the barman brought a gillywater, he must have recognised the Malfoy profile beneath the black hood of his cloak. This was another calculated risk. Aberforth Dumbledore was a rare creature, a deep traditionalist whose sentiments were with the Death Eaters but whose loyalty had always remained unassailably his own. Lucius had argued against the simplistic assumptions of his Death Eater colleagues; Dumbledore and the Hog's Head had never been targeted. Free thinkers were a liability whose discontent spread like plague. Left to his own contrary devices, the younger Dumbledore had been more likely to harm his brother's cause than to help it.

Dumbledore paused. In the no-man's-land between afternoon and evening, the few patrons were nursing their drinks and only the three students by the door quietly working through a jug of butterbeer showed any sign of making work for him. Counting out six extra Sickles onto the tabletop, Lucius drew over a copy of _Quidditch Weekly_ and bent over it. The old man walked away chuckling. 

Lucius flicked over a few more pages. Motorised brooms. Cleansweep were proudly designing a part-magic, part-motorised broom to bring the thrill of the game to Muggles and Squibs. The Department of Magical Games and Sport made no comment on whether the rules would be changed to account for the inevitable endurance advantage. As a puff of air from the doorway made the paper tremble, he instinctively withdrew a little further inside his hood. Quidditch was a vainglorious pastime with no merit beyond providing a discreet venue for political lobbying, but he confessed himself disappointed in its adherents' lack of backbone. 

"Fireball, thanks." From the bar carried a new voice, too young to be his contact. "Light it up."

The sudden smack of ignition a few seconds later killed every conversation in the room. On the bar stood a squat shotglass with a slender scarlet and gold flame shooting up twice its height. And bending over it, with scarlet and gold reflecting off the lenses of his glasses, was Harry Potter. The room seemed to breathe in slightly as its customers recognised him. He placed a coaster over the fire to stifle it, waited a handful of seconds, and threw back the drink with a grimace. 

"Again," Potter demanded, a little hoarsely, sucking his lower lip into his mouth. If he knew he bore the gaze of most of the bar's patrons - as he must have - he gave no sign of it. "Double."

Living as he did in the one-man wasteland fashioned by his parole conditions, Lucius was unused to the surge of fury that Potter’s presence triggered in him. His palm itched for his long-gone wand. Here was the cause of it all. Here was the hand that had felled the Dark Lord and sparked off the mindless wave of ill-planned reform that followed. Britain's withdrawal from the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy. The admission of advisory Muggle members to the Wizengamot. The opening of first Diagon Alley and then Hogsmeade to non-magical visitors. All the political and personal calamities of which the Azkaban guards had brought him news, depositing it gleefully like a lit fuse at the door of his cell where he was powerless to do any more than rage and despair as, outside, they took his world to pieces.

It made little difference that Potter hadn't spoken a word on politics in the years since, wild-eyed and blood-stained, he had won his final confrontation with Voldemort. Glib aphorisms from his interview with the Prophet on that victorious evening were still quoted in defence of just about anything that further enfeebled the word wizard. "It's just blood," spat the seventeen-year-old Potter from a thousand pro-Muggle posters and banners, mugs, t-shirts and flags, thrusting his bloody palm forward in what would become first a salute and then a cliché. "Any wizard who thinks theirs is special deserves the same." The last three years’ disasters gave him cause enough to spill Potter’s blood right here and now. But Lucius had learned nothing if not the art of survival, and the price of revenge was too high.

Under the guttering light above the bar, Potter’s face, though three years older, still bore a shadow of the old anger. Dumbledore took a bottle of red spirit and poured an ill-measured shot. "Rough day?" he asked.

"Is there another sort?" Potter leaned over the bar. "No worse than usual."

"Hex anyone?"

Potter let out a bitter laugh. "Don't believe in the aggressive use of magic."

Dumbledore studied him through his thicket of white hair. "That Muggle photographer turned into a rat all of his own accord did he?" He took up the Firewhisky and slowly layered it on, blowing gently across the top of the glass to disperse the fine smoke already rising from it.

"That's for the Wizengamot to decide." Potter's face darkened. "Or the Magistrates Court if they decide to hand me over. I know my story. One minute there was a pack of them following me and bawling out questions, then all of a sudden one of them scuttled up a drainpipe and the others started screaming." 

The bartender fished out a crooked wand from beneath the bar and touched it to the top of the glass. 

Potter watched the twitching flame with satisfaction. The glint of red flickering across his glasses was the only colour in him as he idly swiped his fingers through the flame, leaving them a fraction longer each time. In his antique black robes with their silver crescent fastenings glittering at the cuffs, he looked like a character escaped from a century-old portrait: all that was missing was the tall black hat crooked under one arm. Only his hair seemed out of place. Resisting the tide of spikes, streaks and quiffs that had swept across wizarding scalps in clumsy imitation of Muggle fashions, he wore it scruffily down to his shoulders. The uneven style was the product of either complete inattention or very deliberate vanity, and Lucius was surprised to find he couldn't determine which. 

Catching the shift in posture as Potter turned towards him, he fixed his attention to the right-hand page of his magazine so that the caul of his cloak obscured his jawline. Only when he heard the clunk of Potter throwing back his drink and depositing the glass on the bartop did he venture a glance up.

Potter was leaning back, elbows on the bar, openly surveying the room as, one by one, the customers grew uncomfortable under his gaze and turned their backs to him. Behind him, the barman leaned in and spoke so that Lucius had to strain to hear.

"... Merlin. Heard it from three people now. Wouldn't be true would it?"

"I didn't return it," Potter replied with deliberate clarity. "I took it down to Knockturn and sold it for ten Knuts to the first buyer I could find."

Dumbledore’s eyes glittered. "You don't need the money."

"I don't need a useless medal either. What's it worth anyway? The one they gave to the Prime Minister, the one for so-called "services to magical co-operation", they called it "Premium Class". That makes him better than everyone who died in the war. Better than people like Flammel, or the wizard who invented the snitch or the broomstick. All for shaking Fudge's hand and telling us we could go on running our own banks and schools like we've always done."

Even in the gloomy light, the tips of Potter's teeth glinted white. 

"My only mistake was I should have talked him down to three," Potter sneered, and with that, he pushed away from the bar. 

"Harry!" As he approached the table by the door, the smallest of its three occupants looked up with an expression of pantomime surprise, as if he alone had been oblivious to Potter's presence. The delicate blond boy scrambled out from the bench seat, steadying his drink with a nervous grin. 

"Dennis," Potter greeted him gravely and slipped into the seat he had vacated. While Dennis looked around, perplexed, and eventually dragged over another chair to resume his place at the table, Potter introduced himself to the bench seat's other occupant, a dark-haired young man who, with his slender height and easy self-possession, could belong to several prominent continental pureblood families that came to Lucius's mind. 

"Harry," Potter said with a plainness that was the height of ostentation, offering his hand. 

"Hugo," the young man replied, smiling awkwardly at Potter's unhurried grip.

"What are you drinking?" The intensity of Potter's expression suggested the offer was restricted to the young man whose hand Potter was only now allowing to slip through his fingers, but four Firewhiskys were ordered and youthful flirtation lost Lucius’s interest.

Impatiently, he watched a few more drinkers creep in: a man with a beard like a thatch of brambles, a red-shawled woman, and two wizards carrying what looked like flying carpets. It was eleven minutes after the appointed meeting time and uncomfortably close to the commencement of his curfew. After two years of reimprisonment, eight months of excruciating house arrest and six weeks of a cruelly limited parole that was almost as bad, he was a few scraps of paper short of freedom. Tonight - one way or another - he would hold a false Muggle passport in his hands, and by tomorrow morning he would be on the ferry to Oostende. On the continent, this Muggle-worship had made little impact. On his grandfather's property by Lake Lucerne, he could make certain that it never made any at all. 

"Never!" the boy Hugo raised his voice suddenly, losing the smug languor he had worn since being singled out as the object of Potter's attention. "Nobody does Potions any more. It's rubbish, everyone hates it. In any case, it clashes with Drama in the timetable."

Potter's jaw noticeably tightened, but the boy sailed on with all the smug wisdom of sixteen going on sixteen and a half.

"It's about options, Harry. I might want to get into Muggle university. And I only need one practical magic NEWT to work at the Ministry - unless I wanted to be an Auror and frankly I don't have a death wish. Charms will get me through."

"Charms?" Potter bit out and momentarily increased the very small distance between them. 

The boy shrugged. "Why not? McGonagall failed half the Transfiguration class last year. And who needs defending against the Dark Arts any more?"

In the awkward silence, the boy reached out boldly to touch the side of Potter's forehead, the famous scar. He murmured something inaudible. 

"What!" Potter snarled suddenly and seized the front of Hugo's shirt. "What did you say?"

Shocked, the boy gathered himself. "I'm a pacifist. I think what you did was incredibly brave. But insufficient efforts were made through diplomatic channels before resorting to violence. Innocent lives were needlessly sacrificed. I'm only saying it could have been done better." He slid his fingers around Potter's wrist and gently dislodged his grip. "It's not your fault. No-one says it's your fault."

The boy flinched at Potter's expression. But beneath the outward concessions to modernity, he evidently retained a measure of the unshakable confidence conferred by breeding and blood. He drew Potter's hand into his lap and tilted his head so that the light above made the most of his fine bones and beautiful lashes. "Buy me one more drink?"

Because Potter's face was turned from him, Lucius misunderstood what followed. Potter leaned in, resting on the boy's thigh, wrapped the back of the boy's neck in his hand and kissed him long and hard enough that his companions blushed into their Firewhiskys and turned away. With the same nonchalance, Potter disengaged himself and returned to the bar.

"Students, are you?" Dumbledore growled a few moments later, looming over their table. "Thought you'd get away with under-aged drinking at the Hog's Head?"

Dennis broke with quick desperation: "Oh no, but you see, Harry Potter-" 

“Out!” thundered Dumbledore with a theatrical flourish. 

The boy Hugo had calmly retained his place, stretching out his arms along the back of the seat and trying his pretty, gracious smile. 

"As you like," the barman said, and winked. "It takes a real knack to get a petrified body down those stairs without knocking a few tender bits on the corners as you go." The boy appeared finally to notice how his eyes glinted under all that wild hair, and to recall that the old man staring him down was also the owner of Hogsmeade’s shadiest bar. As he left, with a wounded glance at Potter lounging against the bar and cradling another drink, the door closed emphatically behind him. 

The bar was slowly filling as the Saturday evening deepened. From one of the new clubs nearby, muffled bass beats hit the floorboards, reduced by the charms to soundless vibrations. Among the newcomers from the street were a few of the new breed of swindlers: refugees from the modernisation at the Ministry who had been lured to Hogsmeade by the promise of easy tourist money. A few cheap tricks with rabbits and handkerchiefs merely cost them their pride; the Muggle audience, yearning like children underneath their cynicism, had a great deal more to lose. Depositing sacks, padlocked chests and boxes with breathing holes by their feet, they chose their solitary stools around the bar and sat silently on their drinks. 

Lucius's curfew was fast approaching. If, as suspected, the Ministry was aware of his movements, he had a clinical two seconds past curfew before they tore up his dearly won right of free movement and slammed him back in Azkaban for good. Lucius's fingers brushed over the pockets in the sleeves of his robe. If it came to down it, they could certainly try. 

The base of a glass clunked on the table in front of him. It was the drink Potter had apparently made his signature, a Chinese Fireball. Scarlet and gold, burned like all the rivers in the underworld and tasted much the same. Lucius had drunk it once or twice, long ago. With the right cooling charms cleverly applied, it could be swallowed without putting out the flame. 

A few moments after the drink arrived, so did Potter. He slipped into the chair opposite and laid down his own glass. 

"Mr Potter," Lucius remarked after some time, finally looking up from the magazine. "As ever, a pleasure."

Potter watched him thoughtfully, conspicuously still for the first time since he had entered the room. 

"I'd have called it a surprise, Lucius," he replied evenly. "For a man under curfew you're a long way from home."

It had taken an instant for him to realise what was different. Potter's eyes were on a perfect level with his own; time had eaten up his height advantage. Lucius dropped a touch of his deliberate drawl, "Thanks to the wisdom and mercy of the Ministry, there is nothing remarkable in my presence in a commonplace public bar." 

The young man's tenacity was unaltered. "Not remarkable perhaps," he considered, leaning back cockily in his chair. "Just a bit suspicious. What's your business here?"

The habitual authority in that question stirred all Lucius's combative instincts. "For all you know, the same as yours," he insinuated with a slow smile.

Potter gave a curt, surprised laugh and Lucius pressed on.

"Although I hardly profess myself an expert in these matters, your young friend appeared - well - _young_. You seem to have no fear that your loyal advocates in the press will find out about your very particular appetites."

Potter's reaction was anything but retreat. "I've never hidden anything. The Prophet chooses not to know." He crossed his ankles under the table so that the tip of his boot brushed Lucius's calf. "And my appetites aren't as particular as all that." 

He smiled across the table with all the recklessness of youth and beauty. A lesser man might have stumbled but, to Lucius, Potter's aptitude for the unexpected was a hard-learned lesson. In fact, he found his blood quickening with the prospect of confrontation. He refused to acknowledge Potter's extraordinary advance by recoiling from it.

Lucius pushed the glass away. "A little too vulgar for my tastes."

Potter's expression was disconcerting, as if somewhere in the last three years he had grasped that a smile could be put to far more subtle uses than expressing pleasure. "Really? I'd have thought it was exactly your speed. Classic, magical, just a little bit dangerous. Are you sure you won't give it a go?"

"Quite."

"Then what else can I get you?"

"Not all of us have the luxury of endless free time," Lucius snapped, straining to recall what rumours he might have heard as to whether Potter had any occupation besides his haphazard appearances as a reserve for one of the less consequential Quidditch teams."The Prophet has been somewhat unkind on the subject of your leisure hours. Didn't I read that you'd missed the opening of the Ministry's new monument to the fallen? The editorial blamed too many nights on the town-" 

Frowning, Potter hooked Lucius's rejected Fireball, still burning gently, towards him. 

"-and an excess of alcohol." 

When Potter extended his finger, the flame jumped towards it, abandoning the drink to dance obediently at the end of his fingernail. Tilting his hand side to side, he poured the little blaze from finger to finger, watching it thoughtfully. "I was out of the country," he muttered. "Not that it's anyone's business. Certainly not yours."

Tipping the flame onto the tabletop, Potter called to it, hissing softly between his teeth. It dimmed and surged, weaving spirals at his command. He was indulging, perhaps, in the liberty of being in the Hog’s Head as opposed to Hogsmeade’s other drinking dens, most of which had responded to the inevitable spate of unequally matched bar brawls with one simple, brutal rule: a complete blackban on performing magic. The Hog’s Head had responded with laconic understatement in the form of a small wooden sign over the door. It read “Beware of the drunken wizards”. 

"A lovely little trick," Lucius said in a low voice, leaning across the table to block the conspicuous display from the other patrons' curious eyes. "But sadly wasted in the company of wizards. No doubt the Muggles will fill your hat with their paper money if you take it outside."

The observation was deliberately ungenerous: this confident pyromancy was vastly superior to the shoddy, desperate spellwork of Potter’s youth. In fact, many wizards four times Potter's age couldn't work an ungovernable element like fire wandlessly, at least not without the effort showing. The only question was the intention behind his display. Precious seconds ticked by. Potter glanced up at him, unhurried, obstinate as an old Erumpent. Lucius watched him impassively. Any animal could be made to move off. It was a question of finding the sharpest stick to prod it with.

Lucius dropped his voice lower, "And this is the magic it cost all those hundreds of lives to preserve, is it?"

Potter crushed the little flame beneath his hand. Gripping the extinguished glass tightly, he threw it back. There was a quiet wheeze as he sucked in air to cool his raw throat. 

"How did you fall in with him?" Potter asked: a sudden, brittle challenge. "In the beginning. There must have been a time before he was mad. When he convinced all those people to follow him. What did he say to win you over?"

Four years ago, or five, Lucius might have seized this opportunity and turned history on its head. Given an hour of careful persuasion, he could perhaps have seduced Potter away from his one-dimensional beliefs. Young men were drawn to grand ideas, this he knew well, the bigger and more improbable the better. The more passionate a believer, the easier the conversion: it was simply a matter of replacing one rigid set of principles with opposite ones. Now, it was a waste of his remaining twelve minutes of free movement. "If you've finally developed an interest in political history," he suggested, "read the transcript of my trial."

Potter watched him stand up, scowling. "You didn't have a trial."

"Then you may take that as your answer." Lucius drew up his hood. All he needed was the passport to leave the country without passing any magical security measures. Shadows were deepening outside; he would take his chances on waylaying his contact in the laneway.

"Sit down, Lucius," Potter said. A sudden weight dragged at Lucius's legs, invisible tentacles of force wrapped around his knees. With a reflexive wrench of will, he threw off the spell, making Potter jerk back and blink up at him, wearing a surprised, vanishing smile. 

"Sit down," Potter repeated, now urgently, gripping the edge of the table. "Whoever you're waiting for won't be able to reach you here."

Lucius put on an indulgent smile. "What a remarkable instinct for the dramatic you have. You must find the peacetime dreadfully slow."

"What do you think is in the chest with the padlock?" Potter continued, very low, glancing towards the scruffy man who had recently chosen a seat at the opposite end of the bar. "I recognise him, he's Magical Law Enforcement. And look at the two in the corner, sipping their Firewhisky like it might be hemlock. They're not regulars." 

The solitary man with the unidentified chest Lucius had long ago identified and planned to deal with; the pair with the flying carpets in the corner tipped the odds against him. And Potter's intentions were very curious indeed. "A flattering reception," he noted evenly, resuming his seat. "What has put the Minister in such an anxious frame of mind?"

Potter snorted. "Come on, Lucius! You tell me. I'm the last one to know. You must have heard the rumours. Fudge makes a point of not telling me anything."

"Naturally a young man of your reputation has other-"

"I don't," Potter snarled. With an equally sudden shift, the young man rolled his shoulders back in a forced shrug. "The two blokes with the carpets, they're Ministry but not officially. The one with the beard was ditched by the Aurors a year ago. Convenient, isn't it? Everything they do is off the record. Nothing gets pinned on Fudge." 

Lucius rotated the empty glass nearest him, measuring the room out of the corner of his eye: distance from the table to the door; between each of the three agents; angle of the stained mirrors in each corner. The Ministry appeared to prefer him either re-incarcerated or dead, and he was close enough to curfew that if he left the security of public witnesses now, they would hardly trouble about a few minutes one side or the other. Provided Potter kept out of the fray, he could cripple three opponents, but the inevitable breach of his parole conditions made the victory useless unless he held that passport in his hands first and won himself a good head start. A little under ten minutes of freedom remained to him; the walk to the Floo would eat up five of them - more if he was waylaid.

"I'm sorry about your wife," Potter broke the silence abruptly. "And Draco."

The glass rocked on the tabletop and Lucius tightened his grip to still it. It was common knowledge that Narcissa had been killed by an unidentified culprit in a public street not two weeks after the Dark Lord's fall, while Lucius was serving out his second spell in Azkaban. What was less commonly known was that Draco had survived the same attack, though his remaining courage had not, and the last trace he'd been able to find of his son was at a ferryport in Italy, boarding a cruise ship to the Greek Isles under an assumed name, taking with him nothing of his heritage except a few saleable gemstones. 

"Is that so." 

Potter glowered at the tabletop. "Too many people have died."

This from the mouth of one of the very few who might have possessed the power to halt the blind destruction that followed Voldemort's fall. 

“Too many?” Lucius repeated in a tight, menacing voice he barely recognised. “Did you imagine that your crusade, being virtuous, would have no casualties? Obtuse to the bone, you idealists. Too impatient to think beyond your circular slogans. Too short-sighted to weigh up the consequences before the fact. Spare us your pitiful breast-beating.” His elbows picked up the vibration of Potter kicking silently at the table leg. A moment’s pause gave him the clarity to draw conclusions. “Or can it be that your new world has turned out to be less than the paradise you expected? Oh dear. What a shame for all that bloodshed to come to nothing.”

Potter didn't glance up. It was often said that he resembled his father, but age was making that less and less true. The James Potter of Lucius's disinterested memory had eyes creased with laughter and a confidence that bordered, even to the end, on apathy. The younger Potter wore the same restlessness differently. Right now, unshaven and drawn, he looked as if he missed the days when he had had to duel for his life in earnest and would welcome the chance to do so once more. 

"None of this is -" Potter was hissing fiercely when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder. "George!" he gulped, his face switching dexterously to a grin as he jumped up.

"At your service," replied the unmistakable disfigured Weasley. "Who's your friend?"

Leaning into the shadow and shrouded by his hood, Lucius reached for the Portkey at his wrist. 

"No-one," Potter replied lightly and an instinct he might come to regret stilled Lucius's hand. Potter moved a few paces further from the table and drew the newcomer with him. "Another drinker, didn't catch the name. What brings an upstanding businessman like you into -" 

"Into this den of depravity and filth?" 

They were joined by a taller redhead whose long limbs attempted to mimic his brother's nonchalant slouch. Ronald Weasley deposited three foam-topped glasses on a spare tabletop. "Looking for you - what else?" 

Lucius kept one ear on the conversation as he resumed his planning. Crossing one ankle over his knee, he drew the magazine back towards him and began unpicking his bootlace. 

One of the greater travesties following Voldemort's defeat had been the appointment of Kingsley Shacklebolt as temporary Minister of Magic, with Arthur Weasley as his omnipresent deputy, for the six weeks it took to organise the first elections and allow the public to choose an even more dangerous candidate. Even now that their patriarch had been relegated to Special Envoy Assisting the Minister for Muggle Relations, the Weasley brood held connections which nothing but this chance twist in history could ever have brought into their grasp. 

Lucius drew the first lace free of its last hook and dropped it under the table. In the shadow by the skirting boards, it tautened at his command and began to skim its way through the shadows towards the far end of the bar. Hobbling his pursuit without the aid of a wand was going to take some effort; he had to reserve enough to defend himself if it was needed.

"You've thought about it, right?" George Weasley was asking Potter. "And you'll have come to the same conclusion we did. The more you invest, the more we return. What's ten thousand returning fifty five percent? It's a bloody holiday in Monte Carlo and a lifetime's supply of top-of-the-market racing brooms, that's what."

"I'm not putting in ten thousand," Potter told him. 

Ronald grinned widely. "I told you. Harry's not afraid of a bit of a risk. Fifteen, is it?"

Potter took a mouthful of the drink, then shook his head. 

"Two and a half." Over their astonished silence, Potter insisted: "And only because it's you guys asking. This is a bloody stupid idea."

Lucius's bootlace wound itself obediently up the face of the unidentified chest sitting by the feet of the Magical Law Enforcement agent and knotted itself around the padlock that bound it closed. A far from permanent obstacle but enough to buy him a few moments' advantage. His other lace struck the floor and started for the room's corner, ready to knot the fringe of the carpet carried by the ex-Auror into the weave of the mat beside it on the bartop which supported three bottles of high-proof spirit and a smouldering candelabra. 

"Two and a half won't cut it,” George Weasley was saying with his arm around Potter’s shoulder. “The investors come on board because they see that you're committed. The announcement could be any day now." 

That was enough to tell Lucius they were betting on the Galleon, which was not only foolhardy but as close as you could get in these lax times to illegal. Lucius had sources enough to know that, within the week, a date would be set for the Galleon's tentative entry into the foreign exchange market. Among the Ministry's incompetent attempts to discourage speculative trading was the fact that the Galleon's exchange rate, initially fixed to the pound, would be known only to the Muggle Prime Minister and the Minister himself, which naturally included a small army of friends and allies. In a frantic attempt to stem the tide of pre-emptive insider trading, the Ministry had banned the transport of large quantities of Galleons and prayed that, deprived of hard currency, wizards would shun the phantasmagorical Muggle concepts of cheques and credit. 

"We haven't got much time left, Harry,” the younger Weasley resumed. ”If you're with us, it has to be now."

Potter disengaged himself from the elder brother's grip. "I said two and a half. I've had a few big expenses lately, and this isn’t exactly a sure thing. What happens if your predictions go the other way? It's a nice plan to make money without putting yourself on the line, isn't it?" 

"He thinks we're in it for the money," said the elder Weasley to his brother in a tone of deep offence. "Course we are. Without money, we can't do anything. We can't send Mum and Dad to Spain for a break. We can't put something towards that cottage in Cornwall Dad swears he's never going to retire to."

His brother added quietly: "And Ginny can't go to Martinique to do her apprenticeship." 

Without discernibly moving, Potter created a vacant space around him.

"Come on Harry, you know I didn't mean-"

"Of course you didn't," Potter cut his friend off coolly. "But it's a good idea. I'll give the money to Ginny if she needs it. Let her decide what to do with it."

A new voice chainsawed its way into their conversation. "Hey, aren't you ...oh!" 

A young woman with violently silver eye make-up and sleek blonde hair - so massively out of place in the Hog's Head that her entrance had made almost a greater impact than Potter's – stopped in her tracks where she was pushing past them to the bar. Potter was already turning his shoulder to her when he laid eyes on her companions.

"Harry," he smiled, extending his hand distractedly to the girl and then to her friends, three men at an indistinct age between school and adulthood, wearing those scanty Muggle t-shirts that made them look like their bodies were for sale. "Excuse me, lads," he nodded dismissively to the Weasley brothers, who shared a silent black look. 

"Harry-" Ronald stepped forward.

"Later," Potter said pointedly, and this time did turn his back. 

"We'll hold you to that," George muttered as the two brothers slunk off to the door.

"Oh my god!" the blonde girl was continuing, clustered with her three friends around Potter at the centre of the bar. "We know all about you, of course. My little sister thinks you're fantastic. Hey, listen, can I get a picture with you? She'll be shattered!"

Potter watched her disdainfully as she scrabbled around in her bag and produced a tiny portable telephone. 

"Who's getting the first round?" she flung out as she passed the telephone to one of her male companions. "Pineapple Breezer - cheers."

"They won't have that," replied one of them with a touch of embarrassment, crossing lightly muscled arms over the Ogdens logo on his shirt. 

"Watermelon then," she corrected absently, threading her arm around Potter's waist and flashing a white smile at the telephone in her friend's hand. It promptly emitted a low popping sound and pink smoke began to ooze from its face. Her friend dropped it suspiciously on the bar.

"Oh! That's what you get for buying them off the internet, isn't it?" she pouted up at Potter, brightly overcompensating for the setback. "This place is a bit rubbish. You don't like it, do you? How come they don't have any music?"

"You want the New Phoenix," Potter told her, slowly. "Back down to the high road, turn right. It's the tartiest place in town. You'll love it." 

The moment turned ugly: the girl planting her feet apart as if squaring for a confrontation. "I met David Beckham once, you know," she said loftily. "He was a complete gentleman. You wizards are so bloody full of yourselves."

As she stalked out, she failed to notice that the false fur around her jacket collar had sprouted claws and two malevolent yellow eyes. Lucius glided to his feet, appropriating their departure as a convenient distraction from his own exit. Identifying the movement instantly, Potter took a step forward.

"Don't mind them." It was the young man with the Ogdens shirt, diverting Potter with a meaningful hand on his forearm. "I shouldn't have brought them here. Won't make that mistake again."

Potter turned to him, carefully keeping Lucius in his peripheral vision. "It's not your fault what's happened to Hogsmeade," he said flatly. "Unless you voted for Fudge."

Potter surely couldn't have missed the nervous quickness to the young man's shrug as he changed the subject brightly: "I saw that charity game you played. Best catch of the season - better than anything the professionals have come up with. The League's going downhill, isn't it, with all the money being thrown around in football."

The corruption of magic had got so deep that it was impossible to guess whether this man was a wizard, a Squib or a Muggle who'd chanced across a copy of the Prophet. His gaze drifting warily up and down the man's torso, Potter could be assessing that very question. 

"You play, do you?" 

"I was a Chaser in my last year at school. Ravenclaw. I can show you the pictures if you want," he said, with his direct gaze and emphatically dark smile. This finally won him Potter's full attention and Lucius slipped out onto the staircase. 

He lingered just inside the short stairwell, where his pursuit could see it was too early to announce themselves by following him. The walls here were a kind of archive: old notices and posters affixed with spells that management had not been bothered to break. Instead, the next generation of advertisers had laid new charms over the old until the half-inch-thick paper rustled with conflicting magic. His eye caught on the first two letters of an old campaign poster: "Fudge" in bold red beneath an avuncular picture which smiled and nodded, a monosyllabic slogan whose utter lack of imagination had proved perfectly judged to make him the first democratically elected Minister of Magic.

He detached two buttons from his sleeve and tossed them on the stairs behind him, where they opened into gaping black holes in the wood which sucked in the light like malevolent mouths. Leaning over to check them brought the whole of the bar room back into view. Potter and his new friend were standing just inside the door in the sort of clinch that suggested Potter's hand under his companion's shirt had found a stretch of bare flesh and its owner was eager for him to find some more. 

"Floo!?" Potter was saying incredulously. "What happened - did you fail your Apparition test?" 

"Never sat it," grinned his companion "Why bother? Anywhere that's not on the Floo you can get a taxi quick enough. Let's get-" 

As Lucius cast down a final charmed button and tightened the knots in the shoelaces he had laid earlier, Potter's cold words carried, "I'm busy after all. Better catch your friends."

With one last glance back - behind the bar, Dumbledore's wink could have been nothing more than a trick of the light - Lucius descended briskly to the street.

It was the first time he had seen the new Hogsmeade by night and he vowed it would be the last. The clubs and the fast food store threw their neon glow over everything, like a permanent, unsleeping killing curse enveloping the whole town. 

A few feet down the laneway, two figures stepped out from a doorway. Even in the low light, the Weasley features were clear.

"Out late, aren't we?"

"Up to something?"

"Something we can keep quiet about. For the right price." 

Lucius glanced at the clock tower on the post office rising over the rooftops. It was two minutes until curfew. As the brothers' attention flicked up and back again, following his gaze, he extracted his handkerchief and tossed it into a puddle by their feet. 

"For five thousand Galleons, I shall expect more than mere silence," Lucius informed them pleasantly as the yellow mist curled up from the puddle. "What else would you care to offer?"

From the bar behind him came a shower of glass and raised voices, Dumbledore's the loudest. The door at the top of the stairs slammed shut from the inside.

"Fifteen for silence," the elder Weasley went on quickly. "Anything else we charge by the hour and for you it's four times the price."

"Plus expenses."

The tendrils of mist were at waist height and climbing. 

"I'm flattered, gentlemen, by your estimate of my resources. You have perhaps forgotten that one of your father's first actions in his temporary office was to confiscate the contents of my family's vaults, which are still being held by the Ministry for investigation. Once you've convinced him to have them returned, we can negotiate at a more lucrative ..."

That was as far as he needed to go before, one by one, they collapsed. Lucius banished the handkerchief with a snap of his fingers as he stepped over their bodies.

He had almost reached the end of the lane when a wide-shouldered figure swung around the corner out of the high road. "Stop where you are, Malfoy."

Auror Dawlish was instantly distinguishable by his imposing stature and a stride that seemed intended to walk through anything and anyone. His reputation for arrest with excessive force had become legendary in the years since the election of Fudge, his patron. It was he who'd been in charge the night the Goyle boy had killed himself. Lucius slipped the silver ring off his middle finger with his hand concealed in his sleeve.

"Dawlish." 

"I'm very glad to see you, Malfoy. We had a betting pool in the office over how long your parole would last - of course if it had been up to us, you would never have got out in the first place. We made sure they kept your old cell free for you. Only a matter of time before we got you for something. Now are you going to ... what was the old man's phrase? That's it. Come quietly."

A minor hex exploded just to the left of Lucius's shoulder - not an outright attack yet, but a provocation. When Lucius failed to flinch, he threw a couple more, the second tearing a hole in Lucius's sleeve and grazing skin. 

"Come on, Malfoy," the Auror grinned wolfishly, watching the blood well up. "This isn't like you. Let's have a bit of slap and tickle before I do you. I'll even give you a fighting chance."

He raised his wand and Lucius calmly tossed the silver ring toward him.

 _"Evanesco!"_ Dawlish cried, rattled, but when the spell made contact, the ring simply exploded into white light. Taking shelter behind the raised folds of his robe, Lucius escaped the searing energy that tore the skin off Dawlish's face and made him scream. 

At the far end of the laneway, several sets of footsteps hurtled down the Hog's Head's steps and sped toward him. He snarled in frustration as he edged toward the high road, held up by the wild, blind curses Dawlish was hurling out as his free hand covered his bleeding face. 

_"Diffindo!"_ the Auror shouted. "You're a dead man, Malfoy. Crucio!"

Spells were coming from the sprinting figures at the other end of the laneway, too. He blocked two of them wandlessly but it left him drained and aching. 

_"Petrificus-"_ That one caught him at the most vulnerable moment, freezing his right arm by his side and rendering his Portkey instantly redundant without his wand hand to lay upon it. As Dawlish, blood dripping between his fingers, staggered towards him, Lucius dodged around and put the Auror between him and the pursuit, but the spells kept coming and he knew himself too weary now for safe disapparition. A disintegrating hex missed his ear by inches: it caught the wall at the corner and sent the bricks jumping across the laneway's mouth in a perilous shower. Past Dawlish and the flare of mad spellwork and smoke that surrounded him, one of the three figures was dropping back, nursing a wounded leg, and another was pulling slightly ahead. 

The bricks kept pelting down and the pounding footsteps were almost on top of him. Abandoning his faltering shielding charm, he threw up one last desperate wandless spell as he stepped out under the deadly rain of bricks.

A determined hand closed around his upper arm and a familiar voice shouted over the odd clinking sound at his feet: _"Apparate!"_.

*

As they materialised at their destination, their momentum kept them hurtling forward, tumbling them both onto the damp grass: a miraculously gentle landing for a Side-Along Apparition at speed. 

Underneath him, Potter's chest heaved from the chase. The magical force of the Apparition still sizzled on his skin and Lucius, depleted from the strain of wandless spellwork, soaked up its replenishing strength. He was out after curfew, in breach of his parole, at the end of his resources and now in unknown territory. He would take any advantage at his disposal and Potter was secreting magical energy as casually as used breath, strongest around his wand hand which through all the turbulence of impact had not lost its grip on Lucius's arm. 

"You're having a lucky day," Potter grinned, his panting already easing into calm speech. "If you'd taken one more step, the bricks would have got me before I could reach you."

"Luck," Lucius sneered. Underneath the fatigue burned the satisfaction of having mastered three armed opponents. With a gruelling effort, he found that his right arm could be forced to take his weight and lever him into a sitting position. 

"All right," Potter conceded, rolling back on his elbows. "Not just luck. Some pretty fancy spellwork too. What was the last one?" Lucius reflected. What had he used? In the fever of sheer self-preservation, he had fallen into instinct: there had been no spell so much as a desperate outflinging of magical will. "You think _I've_ got a thing for drama. That's as showy as you get, isn't it, turning bricks into Galleons." Potter’s voice lost its teasing edge. "Teach me that one."

Lucius withdrew, standing up in the darkness. At his feet, Potter sighed. They were in an enclosed space with ankle length grass underfoot and the solid silence of tree trunks nearby. The one or two faint stars did little to alleviate the darkness and, apart from the distant efforts of the breeze, he could hear nothing, nothing at all. 

"Where is this?" 

"Home."

The warmth of Potter's hand on his petrified elbow surged down his arm and weakened the spell's grip. Potter guided him towards a door whose dark outline was scarcely visible against the white wall behind it. At his murmured command, it swung open and the inside of a high-roofed house illuminated itself. 

"Welcome," Potter said as the door closed behind them. He added, turning back, "I'm sure you'll understand." And then the spells rolled off his tongue: _"Accio wand! Accio Portkey!"_

The silver Sickle at Lucius's wrist tore away, exploding in a blue flash as Potter's disintegrating hex caught it mid-air. A few more spells gained him the tiny silver dagger from Lucius's front pocket and the final two buttons from his wrist. 

"Anything else I should know about?" Potter spun his wand idly in his fingers.

If it should come to a mortal threat, Lucius would have one chance for a desperate wandless strike: until that point, the surest strategy was outward compliance. "I assure you," he replied pleasantly, "you have rendered me quite defenceless."

Potter laughed appreciatively at that, eyes dancing. "I doubt that, Lucius." He approached, tucking his wand into his back pocket. Lucius held himself stiffly as Potter hooked his thumbs into the border of his hood, running his thumbs over its fringe of dark fur curiously, then slowly drew it back. Potter looked him in the eye as he did it, from his man's height and with a man's lack of apology. With one authoritative snap he dealt with the single button at Lucius's throat. "This will do," he said, slipping off the cloak and pitching it onto a coat rack which stood several feet away by the door. "And the belt. Then I think we can trust each other." 

With an ironic grin, Potter moved off to revive the greying coals in the fireplace. "Would you like something for your arm?"

"Nothing is necessary," Lucius replied. In any case, Potter's attention was absorbed in the hand he held over the grate, coaxing a feeble glow out of the spent coals. 

Lucius took in the main area of the cottage: a big, rectangular room that suggested a former life as a barn or a church. Opposite the entrance lay the fireplace and a long kitchen bench. The remaining wall space was packed floor to ceiling with cabinets and bookshelves towering over the couch and armchairs in the centre of the room. In the far left corner stood a canopied bed, inadequately shielded by a folding Japanese screen. With its old wooden beams, torchlight and high ceiling, the room had the austerity of a monastery, and Lucius was certain that he and Potter were the only human creatures for miles around.

Lucius revisited his first fleeting thoughts on picking himself up from the grass outside: he could not discount the possibility that this was an abduction rather than a rescue. The protocols governing the Ministry's' interrogation techniques were admittedly weak, but Potter's home was beyond their reach entirely. It would be an unlikely stroke of genius to have Potter, with his armour of public reverence, carry out the Ministry's dirty work at a safe arm's length. The only tenuous connection in his supposition was Potter himself. 

"In the spirit of trust," Lucius asked, pocketing a birchwood pencil from the sideboard to wield as a last-resort wand, "Shall I take it you intend to abide by a host's duty of hospitality?" 

"Of course." Leaving the flickering fire, Potter barely spared him a glance as he made for the tall cupboard by the sink. "So long as you abide by a guest's duty of not attacking me when my back's turned. And don't forget, I'm your alibi. According to me, you left the Hog's Head with me at ten-minutes-to, well inside your curfew, and no-one can swear differently. Only Dawlish would have seen your face and, apart from Fudge's faction, the Wizengamot won't believe a word he says. If he makes it. What did you do to him?"

If it was an interrogation, it was inept, and this brought Lucius no comfort. "You appear to have manoeuvred yourself into a curious dead end, Potter," he observed. "If my errand in Hogsmeade was illicit, you have made yourself complicit in it. If not, you have deprived an innocent man of his liberty. Either way, you've gained nothing by way of advantage. Your only certain course is to return me to my home and trust that silence on this subject is to our mutual benefit."

"That all depends on what I want," Potter replied, glancing up from the thin bottle of ginger schnapps he had drawn out of the cupboard. He poured the first of two glasses. "Doesn't it? And since you bring it up, what were you doing in the Hog's Head?"

Lucius let the proffered drink dangle disinterestedly from his fingers. "As you observed, drinking. It is, after all, one of the few establishments in Britain to remain in wizarding hands."

Potter followed his glance toward the broomstick by the back door. It bore the distinctive sleek head of the Nimbus brand. A vintage model: the recent ones were disfigured with the branding of their new Muggle parent company, a horizontal line of four linked silver circles.

"That's not your style, Lucius," Potter said, his gaze lingering on the broomstick. "We both know what you've put on the line before to defend the old ways. You won't watch it all disappear without a fight." 

In view of the fact that the depth of the Death Eaters' defeat and the retribution of the new order had forced Lucius to spend three years doing exactly that, he answered frostily. "You misunderstand the priorities of an old man, Potter. The new Ministry has my unqualified support." 

"Rubbish!" 

The vein of real hostility in Potter's voice made Lucius question, once again, his intentions. Lucius took a tiny sip from his glass, sifting for the familiar trace but detecting nothing behind the burn of the liqueur. It would be a foolhardy act for the Ministry to trust Potter's maverick tendencies with a supply of Veritaserum. Foolish enough, in these incompetent times, to be entirely plausible. 

"It makes no difference."

"Like hell it doesn't!" Potter burst out furiously, and Lucius, whom the last few years had stripped of any vestiges of loyalty to man or cause or principle and who certainly owed Potter nothing by way of tolerance, abruptly reached the end of his patience.

"If your urge for heroics demands a villain, Potter," he advised coldly, "you may cast someone new in the role. I have no intention of wasting my time on a lost battle. Your friends have made sure that every member of their diverse representative government barks with the same voice. The slightest dissent attracts suspicion and the occasional unannounced Auror raid - and if that proves insufficient, it is followed by a charge of Conspiring Against the Muggleborn and a spell in Azkaban. Next time you go trawling through Hogsmeade, try to look at something other than the eligible bachelors. Try to imagine why on earth intelligent wizards would bother fighting your Muggles for possession of it. The Death Eaters you're thinking of, the ones who call themselves revolutionaries, they are hardly fighting for victory any more. They simply prefer their campaign of pointless violence to any of the bleaker alternatives available to them. Their logic has a certain attraction." 

Potter's eyes glittered; he looked anything but chastised. "I thought so." 

Abandoning his inquest on that self-satisfied note, Potter flicked upon the fastenings of his robes. He removed them like onion skin: the tailored shirt and trousers he wore beneath them were just as black, formal and anachronistic. As he draped the discarded clothes over the back of a chair and unlaced his boots, Lucius made another quick survey of the room: several of the cabinets displayed knives and the wire which suspended the owl's cage by the window would do for an impromptu garrotte. Potter's arrogant sense of invulnerability would be Lucius's foremost weapon, if any proved necessary. 

Potter collected his glass and threw himself into the corner of a couch, drawing up his bare feet and bending his knees up: a childish pose that fitted awkwardly on his long limbs. The silence appeared to draw attention to the presence of a guest in his home. He seemed both pleased and discomfited by that fact, and the result was an onset of twitching, nervous tension. 

"Why don't you sit down?" Potter said suddenly - but until he had a better idea of Potter's intentions, Lucius wouldn't have dreamt of it. Potter swallowed. "I said I was sorry about Narcissa and Draco."

Lucius laid his glass on the coffee table with exaggerated calm. The destruction of his family was not a subject he would permit Potter – or anybody - to discuss. He turned around to investigate the bookshelves. 

"Oh come on," Potter tried a different angle. "A drink will do you good. You're stuck here until morning. I had the Floo blocked when I moved in and we both know you can't set foot outside until your curfew ends."

Lucius put an experimental finger on the spine of an iron-bound text on dark runes. The reference to his supposedly confidential parole conditions told him nothing conclusive. At eight a.m. precisely he would walk through the front door and make for the seaside cottage where his negligent contact spent most Sundays, conveniently isolated from shelter and support. If what Potter had in mind in the meantime was unpleasant, then every moment's delay shortened the period for which he would have to resist or endure it. Lucius stalled.

Potter's extensive and surprising library made it easy. On the one shelf: dark runes, involuntary human transfiguration, three texts on magizoology and Mary Peverell's infamous memoir that had given birth to the term "Death Eater" - the latter so ragged and beaten it could have been Tom's own copy. Distantly aware of Potter's impatient presence behind him, Lucius browsed through the transfiguration text - a late medieval rarity - before replacing it in favour of the dark runes volume. When he flicked open the clasp on the cover, the animated characters thrummed under his palms as they awakened.

"If you're going to open it, do it over here away from the shelves," Potter said, sounding surly. "They're vicious around other books. I lost two volumes of Ptolemy the first time I opened it."

Lucius caught a note of pride in that. If Potter's performance at Hogwarts had been as squalid as Draco's biased reports suggested, he might well be puffed up at having worked out a few tricks for managing dark runes. 

"You'll find that's quite unnecessary," Lucius told him, wrenching the book open to hold the exposed pages toward the nearest cabinet. In its glass doors, not only the text was reflected but also Potter's open grin.

"The reflection makes them harmless?" he asked with poorly masked excitement. "Or is it something else you're doing?"

On the one hand, arcane dark practice was best protected by strict secrecy. On the other, Potter's allegiances were no longer simple. 

"Enchanted runes draw their power from the wizard who reads them," he began unhurriedly, watching the jostle of characters shifting around the page. "The darker varieties feed off magic like a tick. Throughout the centuries before the spread of the Floo network, when letter writing was the mainstay of communication, they were a popular method of assassination. In the fourteenth century, the head of the Wizards' Council was famously finished off by a single character slipped anonymously under her door. The witch reads. The rune grows in strength. Under compulsion, she starts to read the rune aloud and each syllable adds to its power. The more she speaks, the weaker she gets. When they found her, she was drained dry. Beaufort reports that her skin crumbled like an old oakleaf. The rune was so sleek and fat they had to barricade the house and blast the whole place into a crater." 

Lucius closed the book and returned it to its shelf, irritated by the unexpected pleasure beating through his chest. Given the isolation imposed by his parole conditions, a certain weakness for human company might be understandable in a lesser wizard. He turned to find Potter's attention fixed on him, vividly interested with his forgotten glass tilting dangerously on the chair's arm. It wasn't hard, all of a sudden, to imagine Potter on his knees with that same rapt expression raised to the Dark Lord, as he offered his arm to be marked. His eyes alight just as they were now with the fierce commitment Lucius had failed time and again to coax out of Draco. 

"Yes, it's the reflection that inhibits the runes' effect, by interrupting the direct connection between subject and object," Lucius concluded, and finally lowered himself stiffly into an armchair. "I find myself curious, Potter. Isn't this sort of knowledge exactly what your supporters have taken such pains to extinguish?"

Potter met his challenge squarely. "Dark magic doesn't exist," he said with insolent certainty, slipping out of his chair and transferring to the one beside Lucius, one elbow on the armrest between them. "The word 'dark' only expresses your opinion of the wizard who works it." 

It was an unexpected insight in these simplistic days, when words like "dark wizard" were no longer merely an accusation but a charge, conviction and automatic sentence all in one. 

"Take you, for example, Lucius." Potter leaned closer, strangely playful. "You're as dark as they come, aren't you, at least out of the ones who survived. But I was thinking about it in the Hog's Head. Before today, the only spell I've ever seen you cast with my own eyes is a shielding charm, and I'm not naive about your reasons, but it wasn't just the prophecy you protected. Magic is just magic. It’s what you do with it that matters." 

Seeing, as Lucius had seen, the worst that magic could do - the jerk of unnatural life in the rotting limbs of a new Inferius, the liquefaction of a man's mind at your wandtip - might have relieved Potter's propensity for over-simplification. 

"And despite this cathartic insight, the homes of suspected Death Eater sympathisers continue to be raided almost daily."

"That's not my doing," Potter frowned. "I can't stop all of it. They're throwing out the good with the bad, outlawing anything they don't understand. It's all politics, you know that. I make it hard for them when I can."

"A tremendous comfort, no doubt, to the recent arrivals in Azkaban."

Potter fell back in his chair. "I want to fight this, Lucius. Believe me. But who? How? It's not just one person any more. It's everyone. They're all so afraid of another Voldemort, they'll follow anything the Ministry tells them. They believe all Fudge's stupid slogans about security and progress. And like you said, no-one dares say anything against the Ministry - how can they risk making themselves a target when nearly every family in the country had someone who joined the Death Eaters or covered up for one of them afterwards. I'm not a fucking one-man army, am I?" 

Hopelessness sat as improbably on Potter as wings or horns, but perhaps his particular brand of fanatical determination was a self-defeating approach to problems more complicated than the heroic quest. 

"Is Cornelius aware of these heretical views?"

"You'd know Fudge better than I would," Potter snapped. "When did your puppet cut his strings?"

That assumption was only half right. Strings were an indispensable component of Fudge's anatomy, but it was true that somebody other than Lucius was pulling them these days. 

"Cornelius was always susceptible to gold. Your grand new system, of course, has guaranteed his continued addiction; election campaigns are costly, after all. 'One wand, one vote'. Wasn't that one of your expressions?"

For the first time, Potter really raised his voice. "I was seventeen when I said that! Seventeen! Don't you remember how simple it all sounded when you were a kid?"

Lucius, who had been schooled in pragmatism at his father's unforgiving knee, did not. 

As Potter sprang up, pouring himself another generous glassful, Lucius reviewed the house in a new light. Apart from the attacks he'd been obliged to attend on the days when Tom's worst paranoia had demanded bloody hands as proof of loyalty, he had never seen the inside of a Muggle dwelling. But everything in this room appeared magical, from the pictures to the meagre appliances to the contents of the cabinets, which on closer inspection were curious indeed.

"I suppose it was my job to sort out the whole political future of wizarding Britain, was it, along with all the rest?" Potter resumed bitterly, throwing back his drink. 

He had lost all but the dregs of Lucius's attention. As his guest rose, Potter switched his glass out of his wand hand but made no interruption as Lucius crossed the room to inspect the mismatched pair of display cases on the far wall.

Over a pale green porcelain vase decorated with writhing basilisks, Lucius gave a sparse nod and noted simply, "A handsome piece."

"It's Ming." Potter imparted this knowledge glumly, as if it might be somewhat shameful.

"Older than that, I think you'll find." 

Lucius said no more, lingering over the cabinet's many pieces. An ebony figurine with a tail; a quill carved from bone; two rings and an amulet and a floating carpet of silver feathers that had to be tethered to the shelf below it. It was an intriguing collection that could only have been gained with long patience, considerable resources and questionable scruples. He stopped before a tiny chalice: a silver stem supporting a pearl-white bowl so delicate that the light showed through it.

"This is not merely decorative, I presume."

Potter replied with amusement, "It's exactly what it looks like. And no, I don't have a permit."

"Pity. Legitimate Runespoor fetches extravagant prices at auction."

"Nothing here is for sale."

Lucius continued, slower than ever, until he reached the gnarled wooden staff.

"And where did you get this?" he asked finally, his voice an idle drawl.

The staff was crowned with a raven's head in time-blackened silver set with onyx eyes, the bird's bust tapering into a tail that wound down around the black wooden shaft.

"Borgin and Burkes." 

"Ah. An amusing little toy. No doubt Borgin talked it up to five times its value."

Potter spoke from directly behind him. "I know exactly what it is."

The bird's black eyes glittered at him and the hair rose on the back of his neck. Side by side, Potter and his dark hoard seemed to draw from each other a deep and unpredictable potency. 

"Do you now, Potter. Then why on earth do you keep it?"

"It wasn't always Grindelwald's. It had been missing for centuries by the time he tracked it down. Before that it belonged to Paracelsus."

"And before that, Gilles de Rais," Lucius observed tartly. "Hardly an auspicious provenance for a man of your professed politics to hang on his wall." 

"What politics do you mean?"

From the basilisk vase, Lucius drew a silk flower which he stroked across the head of the staff. With one vicious lunge, the silver jaws destroyed it, all but one desultory petal which slid to the floor. "Not especially useful either."

He could feel Potter's determination. "I haven't mastered it yet, it's true. But I will."

And evidently with that thought in mind, Potter slipped his fingers around Lucius's wrist and gripped it. 

The touch made everything instantly and astonishingly clear. He had overestimated the complexity of Potter's intentions all along. His arm strained inside its cage of fingers. In his present predicament, the weapons at hand were few; he found derision to be the sharpest of them. 

"Expert though they were in the arts of unpleasantness, even the worst of my Death Eater colleagues considered certain forms of revenge beneath them."

The warmth of Potter's laughter blew over the back of his neck. "Revenge isn't what I'm after," Potter murmured. His fingers loosened, dipped lazily into Lucius's palm, then released him completely. "And I'll take any odds you like that you won't find it unpleasant."

As Potter retreated towards the couch, each slow step untangled the muscles across Lucius's shoulders another notch. His error of anticipation was inexcusable. Ignorance had lost him incomparable leverage at a time when his escape from Britain was balanced on a knife-edge. His naiveté was, however, explicable. The cabinet glass reflected the blurred shape of his long face: the unforgiving jaw, the heavy-lidded eyes and the hair long ago taken to white. For a long time, the world had been divided into those who despised him and feared him; and those who were in awe of him and feared him; and Tom, who stood well beyond all such mortal sentiments. He was not accustomed to being cast as an object of desire. 

"Come now, Potter," he said as he turned, unhurried. "Surely disinterest is no novelty to you."

Apart from the smirk which hovered at the corners of his mouth, Potter was a picture of casual chastity now, leaning on the back of an armchair.

"It's not new, no. The boot's usually on the other foot, though."

"Naturally," replied Lucius, as chillingly as he could manage under distraction. It was a primitive, absurd sensation. The ghost of Potter's touch still encircled his wrist, making his nerves prickle with unfamiliar feeling. How long since he had even noted the absence of human contact? 

Potter draped himself over the arm of the chair and slid into it. "I could tell you about the final last year when I had to turn down three out of the four Beaters in the bar afterwards." Lucius refused to wonder what had become of the fourth. "Or the Texan bloke who offered me fifty thousand to let him blow me. I can brag if you want to hear it. Wouldn't want you to think I brought you back here because I couldn't get anyone else."

It was only unexpectedness that had put Lucius off balance. Now he was back on familiar ground. Potter had a desire and, therefore, a vulnerability. All that remained was to see what advantage could be had from it. 

"You may spare me the details. The logic of it requires no explanation. The weak and the foolish will always be drawn to notoriety."

Something like annoyance twitched over Potter's face. "That's not the half of it. _No-one_ says no. I've had more straight blokes than you can imagine. Some of them aren't even interested, it's pretty obvious in the end. But they can't make themselves turn down the chance to get Harry Potter into bed." As abruptly as it had begun, his blurted tirade broke off and he turned provocative. "It's a bit like being asked to be the right-hand man to the most powerful dark wizard in three generations. Wouldn't you say?"

Surprising, the difference a mere two hours could make. In the Hog's Head, this line of questioning had come across as glib, even prurient. This time, he could hear the tentative promise in it. He chose his words carefully.

"There were many who were seduced into the Dark Lord's cause for the wrong reasons. Blind ambition. Bloodthirst. The lonely and the alienated were effortless recruits - as you will have noted, so were the feeble-minded. Some of us, however, merely judged his manifesto according to its own merits. The Ministry was as torpid then as it is now - one thing I'll grant your election process, it's forced more work out of the Minister than in the entire history of the office. The various ministers treated their station as an entitlement rather than a duty, and while they basked in their mediocre glory, the schism between the Muggle supporters and the old ways had grown insurmountable. The Hogwarts curriculum only cares to tell one side of the struggle. You would never have been told about the unprovoked mob attacks, the ancient family houses razed to the ground, the constant, simmering hostility. 

"The wizards who had kept to the old ways were a wild species, you must understand. Dark and ungovernable. Devoted to obscure family legends and traditions. Only a leader more extraordinary than the wildest of them could have brought them into a semblance of unity. So you see, the choice was between inaction, and Lord Voldemort. If you come to me looking for repentance, you'll find none."

Potter's bright gaze hadn't strayed.

"And now?" he asked softly. "What would you say the choices are?"

Lucius had had hundreds of days and nights with nothing to do but ponder that very question.

"The only choice now is in the manner of surrender," he answered. "The Death Eaters are no longer a viable force. Too many died, and those who survived were not the worthiest. Leaderless, they have strength enough for small acts of resistance but they will never rule. In any event, the mood of the magical community has changed. It has lost its appetite for bloodshed. In time, their own fathers and sisters will turn them in."

Sprawled on the chair, Potter swung his legs around and straightened.

"So that's it, is it?" he demanded. "You're going to let the old magic die."

"In this country, yes. The people have chosen their fate and there is no sweeter revenge than to let all of their wishes come true."

Potter gave something between a sigh and a low growl. "You don't have to lie to me, Lucius. I've shown you enough illegal artefacts to get myself a decade in Azkaban - can't you see I'm not on the Ministry's side? You must be working against them. Tell me."

"I'm afraid I have nothing to say."

Potter's intense stare might have been an attempt at legilimency so inept that, after the scalpel precision of Tom's practised mind, Lucius simply couldn't feel it. Lucius returned his gaze, steady, blinking slowly. 

"All right," Potter breathed out eventually. He stood. "Would you like to see the pride of my collection?" 

His new note of eagerness drew Lucius's mind to conclusions he should have made earlier. The house was littered with illegal objects. Either Potter performed an hour's worth of concealing charms before he opened his door, or he simply didn't invite guests. The fine layer of dust around the neck of the schnapps bottle suggested the latter. 

"Have a seat. It takes a while to dig it out."

Behind the Japanese screen, he could hear Potter's patient spellwork. It sounded like there were more layers of protective charms than the average Gringotts vault. By the time Potter emerged, Lucius had swallowed his first glassful and poured another. He judged it must be well past midnight, by which time he had planned to be out on the Channel. Still, with his initial strategy stymied, he could be in worse places than here, watching Potter willingly reveal all the hooks and lures that could be used to manipulate him. 

It was a silver box that Potter carried, as long as a man's forearm and inlaid with gold, moonstone, amethyst and one huge watery blue sapphire. The bulky setting and heavy workmanship suggested great age. It had the appearance of a Muggle religious receptacle. The clasp which at first glance looked like ivory turned out on closer inspection to be unmistakable: a dragon calf's tooth.

Although there was space on the couch beside him, Potter placed the object in Lucius's lap and threw down a cushion to kneel in front of him. As Potter drew back the lid, Lucius breathed out a small, disappointed sigh. It was a human bone, probably a religious relic, almost certainly Muggle. 

"Wait," Potter whispered. 

He drew his wand and dispersed the concealing charm. The bone vanished. In its place was a section of golden brown wood, a handspan in length. Yew, fine-grained wood from a young tree and distinctively knotted. The splintered end where the missing half of the wand had been torn away revealed its core. Three strands from the mane of a black unicorn. Even the most dilettante student of magic could identify that combination, never repeated in wizarding history. Potter's lips parted slightly as he looked at it. 

Lucius leaned back. "The leading collections already possess a counterfeit wand of Merlin. You'll find very little interest in acquiring only half. And Borgin and Burke's, unfortunately, have built their reputation on dealing very firmly with customers who seek to return their purchases." 

"Borgin doesn't know anything about this," Potter told him impatiently, his voice slightly hushed. "I got it myself."

"You acquired it how? And where?" 

Potter sidestepped the first question. "A church in Brittany. In a little town called Quimperle. It was hidden in a chamber under the alter, disguised as the relic of a saint."

"All the more reason to doubt its authenticity."

But Potter was immune to uncertainty. "Touch it," he invited as he went on, quick-voiced. "Everything fits. Merlin died in Breceliande, Nimue's prisoner - everyone knows that. But no wall had been built that could have held him in unless he'd been disarmed first. She couldn't destroy the wand, though. Look at it. Even snapping it in half must have crippled her - look how messy the wood is, as if the two pieces had to be ripped apart."

So this was what it took to bring the boy to reverence. Not ideals, not power, but pure, wild magic. How predictably unsophisticated. Nonetheless, Lucius raised his hand over the silver box. The length of wand inside twitched and Potter drew a sharp breath then held it.

"What happens when you touch it, Potter?" 

Potter gave a slow shake of his head, his attention still rapt on the length of wood. "I don't know. I can't get near it." Resting his hand on Lucius' knee, he leaned in. "It's soaked in protective spells, even now."

The wood looked as strong and alive as the day it had been cut and Lucius's skin crackled with the ripples of magic coming off it. 

"Go on," Potter urged. "You made it move before. It recognises something in you."

The bones in Lucius's wand hand ached needily with the proximity of magical power. He reached out. The wand didn't move this time, but his fingertips had no more than brushed it when a shock of immense power ran straight up his arm, bringing with it an overwhelming darkness that seemed to pulse and beat like bats' wings. His hand disappeared into it. The living darkness swept out over the silver box, obscuring it, obscuring his forearm, obscuring everything except for the pale smudge of Potter's face upturned to his. 

"This is new," Potter whispered.

Vivid sensations tumbled past his eyes. A black horse. A sword. A woman with piercing blue eyes and hair that ran like dark water over her shoulders.

The box's hinges sang as Potter closed it, knocking his hand away. "That's enough."

Lucius's vision slowly cleared. His heart was beating with a firmness that made him wonder what feeble imitation of life it had been lending him before. He felt invincible.

Potter, too, seemed subtly different, as if the light that fell on him had changed intensity. Lucius could sense the restless energy in his young muscles, the thrust of blood beneath his skin, the damp breath catching the flesh inside his lips. And the need that flooded off his skin. Lucius's body responded to that without intervention from his mind, one animal to another. Still kneeling at Lucius's feet, Potter looked up at him with his unflinching, impossibly bright eyes and, animal to animal, Lucius also understood that there would be no struggle for supremacy between them. 

"This is not a trophy to be flashed around to casual visitors" he snapped. "If you give way to foolish impulse, you can expect to have it stolen from you."

Potter actually smiled. "Perhaps I thought the risk was worth it. Have I been too subtle? I'm trying every trick I know to get you into bed."

As he lifted the glittering box from Lucius's lap and laid it on the floor, the removal of its bulk worked like the demolition of a wall. He returned his hand to Lucius's thigh. 

Then Potter's gaze descended. In one electric moment, first Lucius's gut, then his palms, then his mind recalled the existence of oral sex. The memory suffused all his limbs, strung his muscles tight. How long had it been? The few moments of freedom allowed by his parole were too precious to waste on physical gratification. It was almost six years since he felt naked skin. The last mouth that touched him would have been a courtesan one weekend when his wife was away. How could he have forgotten the raw power of it - watching the slow parting of a stranger's lips, meeting the hunger in their eyes. The skin around his collar quickly heated. As if upon command, Potter leaned forward.

Lucius laid his hand across the young man's forehead to hold him still. That was extraordinary. Unarmed, he could hardly defeat Potter in a duel, but the right surge of wandless magic at this vulnerable moment could shred his mind or blind him. Even in his shackled state, at the end of Lucius Malfoy's fingertips was a perilous place to be. And yet Potter's lips parted and his eyes fluttered closed. There was a feverish sheen on his skin as he pressed his forehead against the touch. Then he leaned his head back so that Lucius's hand trailed over his face and he opened his mouth across Lucius' palm. 

A wizard's hands were more than mere flesh and bone. It was his wand hand that Potter had chosen as the object of his caress. This hand that had been the conduit of a thousand black and forbidden spells. This hand that had killed.

Potter stroked the tip of his tongue down Lucius's heartline and sucked softly at the heel of his palm. When Lucius pushed his thumb between Potter's teeth, deep into his mouth where it gave him full control of Potter's jaw, the young man actually sighed. His eyes fell open and made a dazed journey up the length of Lucius' arm to his face. His pupils were wide, dark pools. And he was deeply, unmistakably aroused. 

Lucius withdrew his hand. Potter gave a different sort of sigh.

"Aren't you even a bit curious?" Potter bit out. "What have you got to lose? You can name your terms."

Lucius laid his hand flat across the chair's arm. All the tendons in it were taut with the charge of magic. Who would have thought his white-fingered hand was clad so heavily in muscle? His veins sang with the residue of that ancient scrap of wand, and with a new excitement derived sympathetically from Potter's own. There was no need, however, for haste. When the time came to acknowledge his desire, Potter would be waiting. 

Potter rocked back onto his feet and drew himself smoothly up.

"I don't make this sort of offer to just anybody," he said, letting the words speak for themselves, no trace of pride or pique. "Whatever you might think."

As Potter walked away, he dragged his shirt over his head and discarded it, one last assault on Lucius's resistance - unnecessary, as it happened. He pushed back the Japanese screen and stretched out on his bed. He had all the expected appeal of youth, Lucius noted with a new perspective, along with the hint of something wilder and older that came from all his dealings with dark magic. Potter's body might have made a weapon of its own if he'd been given someone to tutor him; wizards immune to all other forms of persuasion could be rendered helpless at the hands of a beautiful young man. Lucius refilled his glass, gripped it between thumb and finger, and downed it in one smooth swallow. Potter, of course, watched. 

"Tell me," Potter changed course suddenly, rolling onto his back and folding his arms under his head. "What does it feel like to cast the Imperius on someone? In cold blood, I mean, not in the heat of the moment. Casting it to make it last." 

The novelty of the question drew Lucius's gaze away from the tangle of dark hair that lined Potter's armpits and emphatically asserted his manhood. He could not remember ever being called upon to describe magic. 

"On a weak mind, unsuspecting and lacking in defences? The act is hardly more diverting than crushing a Doxy. The only finesse lies in timing the moment to strike."

"What about a strong mind?"

Lucius had to cast his memory a good way back; the recollection was not unpleasant. "Like holding an unwilling victim underwater. The pleasure you derive depends on your predeliction for absolute displays of power." 

"Your generation could be the last one to know what it feels like," Potter said to the ceiling. "Have you thought about that?"

Lucius, who had held himself and his family intact through all the infinite cruelties and underhanded attacks of Tom's disfavour, knew himself well able to throw off the curse if Potter's intention was to cast it. 

"There is no reason why I should. Dark spells have disappeared before. Human nature ensures that they will be replaced."

"What sort of dark spells?" Potter rolled onto his stomach, engaged again, and raised himself up on his elbows, emphasising the muscle across his shoulders, the pale brown of his nipples peaking in the cool air, the light catching on a ladder of light pink weals that ran down his left arm. 

"The hermitic wizards in the north of the Ural Mountains, for instance, were credited with developing a curse to do the work of the Dementor's Kiss. There are dozens of eyewitness accounts of its use throughout the Dark Ages, but it disappeared in the wave of regulation of the fifteenth century and no record exists of the incantation. Its last appearance is in the letters of a Chinese traveller to Caracorum in 1394. On the other hand, the Pharaohs practised controlled splinching as a form of punishment. An eagle's head on a human body. A full grown wizard dragging himself around on a dog's hind legs. The spell was said to be irreversible but it is lost too." 

"What about the spiderweb Imperius? What happened to that?" 

"A myth," Lucius replied, quelling another unexpected surge of pleasure. "There is no documented proof of a single wizard controlling large numbers of victims with one spell. All the instances recorded in the histories are common Muggle riots, nothing more." 

Potter swung himself off the bed and pulled a cloth-bound volume from one of the shelves. 

"What about the riots in Manchester in the eighteen-hundreds? Wizards as well as Muggles smashing up any piece of machinery they could lay hands on. No wizard was ever put on trial for it though. Sounds like pureblood troublemaking to me."

The meddling of wizards in the Luddite movement was beyond doubt. What rankled was Potter's misattribution of the acts of a small minority of disaffected Hogwarts graduates, whose revolutionary zeal bore a far greater resemblance to Potter and his fanatics than to the isolationist pureblood community of the time, still timid from the memory of the last Goblin war. 

"If you read the full text instead of muddling up the picture captions with your usual prejudices, you would discover that the perpetrators' heritage was almost certainly _mixed_." Hearing that, Potter laid the open book in Lucius's hands, as if suddenly uncomfortable in the presence of learning. "As is always the case. Half-blood wizards form the vanguard the majority of violent upheavals, you will find. Their sense of alienation -"

Lucius thumbed over a page, then another. 

"You recognise that?" Potter asked softly and perched on the arm of his chair. Lucius did not reply. "I've got a bookshelf full of banned works, Lucius. All of them what they call "dark". What are the odds that not one of them came from your library? "

Potter grasped the green place marking ribbon and tugged it gently. "Do you want it back? You can have it if you like. I was never that good at History."

"Your bargaining is clumsy, Potter."

"I'm not bargaining. Take it." He trailed the ribbon between the open pages and wedged it down the spine. 

Lucius eased the volume closed. "Put it back on the shelf."

Potter thought aloud as he took it, "You can't afford to have it discovered in another raid, can you? I get it." He glanced over his shoulder, clear-eyed, just a touch of a smirk. "If you ever want me to hide anything for you, it's no trouble. In fact, it's a pleasure."

As he stretched up to the high shelf, replacing the book with gentle fingers and straightening the spines of its neighbours, Potter could have been a supplicant reaching out toward a half-glimpsed and glittering idol. How many of the works in this newly acquired library had he actually read? How much of the accumulated knowledge had he absorbed, and how much did he simply presume to be worthy of preservation? It seemed a hallmark of Potter the man as much as the boy he had been to yoke himself to the cause first and only as an afterthought investigate its merit. And this time the object of his heroic instincts was a topic on which Lucius's knowledge was so old and so deep that he barely thought of it as knowledge at all. Potter's reverence as well as his ignorance made him vulnerable. And although he seemed aware of this, Potter did not appear to mind.

Potter sighed as he slouched onto the armchair opposite, falling into a contrived pose, forearms hooked over the back of the chair so all the lean muscle down his arms and chest pulled taut against the dark grey upholstery. He caught Lucius's eyes when they reached his face. "This doesn't have to be complicated."

Lucius kept him waiting, taking his time to weigh up the possibilities. 

"No," he agreed finally. "It won't be."

Potter scarcely moved, but the lazy flirtation vanished from him as visibly as taking off a coat. A new intensity replaced it: a look that took Lucius back to the battlefield. It was easy to forget the smouldering force of will that the habitually introverted Potter could wield in extremity.

"Are you working against the Ministry?" Potter asked.

"No."

"Will you help me do it?"

"Not openly. I will lend you what advice you need."

Apparently unsurprised, Potter accepted that with a gracious incline of his head. 

"And what's your advice?"

"Run for office," Lucius told him, speaking very low. "Run against Fudge."

Potter's ribs visibly tightened and took a long time to release. That much, apparently, had not been what he expected. "I wouldn't know where to start," he answered, hesitating momentarily. "But you would. Wouldn't you?"

A smile spread across Potter's face, slowly as the drawing of a bow.

It's would be counter-productive to lead Potter into specifics tonight. No sense in cowing him with the delicacy of the task that would lie ahead of him. Lucius let his head fall back, idly studying the uneven oak beams that supported the ceiling. Let Potter get himself drunk with the possibilities for now. When the initial flush of excitement was exhausted, that was the moment to revive him with detailed plans, one morsel at a time, or to discard him completely. In the meantime, he would have the pleasure of sealing their strange bargain.

A brisk tapping from the kitchen window made him jerk up and lay his palm over the birchwood pencil in his hip pocket. Easing himself up, Potter thumped the stubborn catch with the shaft of a wooden spoon and threw the casement open. A deep red bird hurtled like a comet through the opening. Circling once, it aimed first for Potter's shoulder then, rebuffed, settled for his insistent forearm.

A young phoenix in its first or second incarnation, judging by the soft, fine tail feathers scarcely flecked with gold, and the unusual clumsiness. That explained a lot: Potter's new fondness for fire tricks and the weals on his left arm, bracketed in pairs for each claw. The phoenix was a demanding companion to master. Potter was young for it, but then of course he had been young for a lot of things. 

Potter extracted a few strands of sage leaves from a drawer and gave a fond smile as the bird lunged for them, tottering on its perch of flesh. Oblivious to Lucius's presence, he murmured to the creature, steadying it with his hand over its folded right wing. The bird nipped gently at his chin and Potter murmured some more.

And there, recalling his own schooldays and his contempt for the weaker boys whose downcast eyes never really lit up except in the company of a familiar cat or owl, Lucius discovered another truth about Potter. He had acquired the habits of loneliness. 

After all, when you considered it, it was hardly surprising. Where in the mediocre institution of Hogwarts, whose hallmark was sacrificing excellence in the name of equality, would Potter have found himself an equal? Or, for that matter, a master. Dumbledore would have shied away from the iron command his boy hero needed: the massive casualties of the Dark Lord's first rising had dealt a deathblow to his confidence in his own leadership. Black, Lupin, unassuming Shacklebolt, paranoid Moody; none of them had been man enough to fill the void. Since Voldemort's fall, most wizards had relaxed into the peacetime like an easy chair; heroics were no longer fashionable and charismatic leaders came in short supply. What Potter needed was a great deal more than companionship. From boyhood, he had declared himself unmasterable often enough that the plea within that statement ought to have been obvious. 

That knowledge cut the last of the tethers on Lucius's imagination. He understood how relations between them were going to unfold. Lucius couldn't abide bland submission in the bedroom: weakness repelled him and begging was a distinctly unerotic act of selfishness. Potter's willing surrender, however, was a trophy worth the winning. Watching the play of muscle across Potter's back as he shifted the ungainly bird onto the other arm, Lucius let his curiosity kindle into outright desire. Tomorrow he may still continue his plans for exile. But now another course had presented itself, stirring up all the old kingmaking instincts he thought had been frozen out of him by Azkaban's long winters and Tom's failure. Potter was not Tom and never could be. Potter was vulnerable to sentiment, loyalty, remorse. If not controlled, he could be guided. And he seemed to have made up his own mind that Lucius's hand was the one to do it. 

"Come here," Lucius said, almost achieving the disinterested tone he was accustomed to using upon house elves and, once upon a time, upon Ministers. Potter glanced up in surprise, but he encouraged the bird onto its perch and approached at a casual saunter, dragging his feet to make his hips sway. This time, Lucius let his gaze linger openly. 

"This ..." - Lucius's lips framed the words wryly - "... _offer_ ... of yours."

"Anything you want to ask for," Potter said matter-of-factly with a fleeting, flirtatious smile. "Anything that gets you off. Nothing you find too ... uncomfortable. Like I said, name your terms."

There was a slender gap between the waist of Potter's trousers and the soft ridges of abdominal muscle beneath it. Lucius hooked his fingers into it and drew Potter hard up against the side of his chair. His skin was warm beneath his trousers and pleasantly cool where they ended. The thump of his heart behind his breastbone was discernable already.

Lucius released him. "Very well."

Potter's eyes betrayed a split-second flash of surprise that suggested he had, after all, doubted his chances of success. His gaze jerked down Lucius's body and back up, head tilted slightly like a man planning his first attempt at a delicate transfiguration. His grin flashed and disappeared.

"You won't regret it."

"See that I don't."

Potter was surveying him still, eyes skimming across Lucius's shoulders as he stood with his hips jutting forward so that his trousers pulled very slightly over the swell to the left of the row of buttons. He asked slowly, "What do you like?"

"Decisiveness," Lucius snapped. "The ability to choose a course of action without prevarication." 

Potter nodded approvingly at that. Then in a practised move he flicked open the three buttons on his trousers and loosened them around his hips. Unhindered, they dropped to the floor leaving Potter standing in a pool of black material, completely naked. As he drew his feet free of the clothing, one by one, Lucius's gaze clung appreciatively to each movement. Potter's body was youthful and hard, his muscles drawn in long, graceful lines. The tautness of his limbs drew the eye to the one part of him that moved freely: his penis rose and fell as he stirred, slightly engorged and standing free of his thatch of unruly hair. His balls swung as he nudged the discarded clothing away. 

Potter stood before him as simply as a statue: openly on display and utterly unconcerned by his nakedness; inviting both scrutiny and pleasure. His body appealled to Lucius's sense of classicism. Slender around the hips, he wore the sleek muscle that he had over his chest and shoulders and upper arms. It was an athlete's frame, economical, functional, no mark of pretension on it. Potter raised his right hand and raked the hair at the back of his head. It might have been a haphazard gesture, except there could be no accident to the way it tensed his pectoral muscle, pulling a fluid diagonal that drew the eye from his sternum to the joint of his shoulder and up along his flexed upper arm. Below it, the slender silhouette of his ribs and hips flowed uninterrupted. 

The human body could be appreciated platonically as an artwork in flesh and bone - a work of nature no more erotic than the smooth flanks of a perfectly bred Aethonan or the pearly petals of a weeping lily. There was no such innocent pleasure in the spectacle of Harry Potter's naked body. Every inch of him was wielded for carnal purposes. He reeked of desire: Lucius's throat was full of the smell of his arousal. Even his body hair lured the eye from the light traces between his ribs, down over his abdomen, inexorably ending at the flushed and swelling shaft of his penis.

Finally, Potter stepped forward, edging his bare feet between Lucius's boots. As if the wanton display he had made of himself was only a prelude. As if Lucius might now want to reach out and touch him. 

The surprise was that Lucius very much did. Muscles deep in his palm cramped with the need for it. Yet he kept his features impassive and his hands still. This was an experiment not only in desire but also in control. Let Potter work for any outward sign of approval. After all, it was only in adversity that the young man appeared to perform to his best. 

"Yes?" Lucius remarked in his most nonplussed drawl. 

As expected, Potter took the display of disinterest as a challenge, his mouth smirking.

"Too fast? Too obvious?" he enquired playfully. "Just a bit too decisive?"

He leaned forward, supporting himself with his hands gripping the back of the couch just outside Lucius's shoulders. It brought his face in very close, and put every inch of his torso within easy reach. 

"I'll slow it down then," he breathed across Lucius's cheek. Lucius's pulse, still leaping a little from the long-gone jolt of the wand shard, turned sluggish in the fog of pheromones that evaporated off Potter's skin. Sweat, arousal, his breath moist and sweet with alcohol. Youth had a smell and he was rank with it.

Very deliberately, Lucius crossed his right leg over his left so that his knee brushed over Potter's scrotum, making Potter jerk forward with his eyes big and unfocussed behind the glasses. Lucius spoke directly into Potter's ear, lips teasing directly over skin.

"Take your time, Harry. There is no call for haste. As you observed yourself, my curfew will keep me here until morning."

A muscle ticked along Potter's jaw as he thrust himself back and righted himself. 

"I see," he said, and managed a thin smile. 

Training his attention on a bookshelf slightly to the left of Potter's ear and mastering the temptation to stare at all the naked skin that made his fingertips burn, Lucius watched Potter saunter into his peripheral vision and then disappear. The suspense was dreadful. He sought in vain for a merciful reflective surface to give him a hint of what Potter was planning, just out of view behind him.

Potter's hand slid over the side of his neck, fingers curled right over the jugular, and settled there. A marble statue would have felt the way the touch made Lucius jerk and stiffen before he could disguise his unease, but Potter gave no sign of noticing. He squeezed gently and dragged his thumb up beside the vertebrae in Lucius's neck, up to the tie that bound his hair. His other hand fastened onto the opposite side, the bony joint of his thumb ploughing over the tense muscles in Lucius's neck. The warmth of his hands and the pressure were not unpleasant. In fact, the firm strokes drew the mind to later possibilities. And every blink threw up a picture on the inside of his eyelids: Potter bending over the couch to reach him, all the bare muscles down his back shifting, his shoulder blades peaking and flattening as he squeezed and stroked.

Potter moved closer and worked both hands into the knots of muscle where Lucius's shoulders met his neck. Every movement was cautiously ventured then repeated with force. A shrewd choice, Lucius acknowledged as, bit by bit, his defensively tensed tendons let themselves go. With the heels of his hands, Potter made firm strokes spreading out from the spine, bruising his shoulder-blades. His leisurely rhythm left a tortuous trough at the end of each stroke, which filled instantly with anticipation and desire. The muscle where the next stroke would begin started to flex impatiently in the moment before Potter's hands descended. Each touch began to leave him more and more dissatisfied. 

When Potter's fingers slipped inside the collar of his shirt, the tightening across his stomach was a plea for them to go further. But Potter's touch remained obstinately chaste. He traced the tips of his fingers around the inside of Lucius's collarbone and back up, and Lucius felt it in all the places Potter's attention neglected: the muscles down his chest flexed restively and he was brutally aware of the way his undershirt dragged over his nipples with every tiny movement of Potter's hands. 

When Potter's fingers met at the base of his throat, Lucius distantly registered that his arms must almost be encircling him. It was only when he felt the brush of hair against his ear that he realised just how close Potter had leaned.

"More?" Potter murmured.

Lucius let his breath out, very slowly, and drew it in again. 

"I take it from your irrepressible swagger that, like all young men, you believe you have invented erotic techniques hitherto unimagined by the human mind." With Potter's forearms resting on his shoulders, he felt the responding shrug and imagined the layered smile that went with it. "I am waiting with some impatience for a chance to correct your misconceptions."

That last part at least was true. The subsidence of the massage's gentle rhythm left him free to notice the throbbing in his groin. Nothing had happened, nothing more than insistent suggestion, but every stroke of the last twenty minutes had reminded him that Potter's firm hands led back along lean arms to his bare shoulders, down a naked torso to the arousal rising between his legs.

Potter laughed, suggestively, wet lips brushing his earlobe. He dragged his hands one last time over the base of Lucius's neck as he stood and circled back around the chair. With a twitch of his index finger, Potter drew a cushion skidding across the floor to edge between Lucius's feet. Then he dropped to his knees. For the second time that evening, Lucius had the impression of a strong constricting charm around his ribs. 

Potter wore his desire with absolute candour, completely unaware that others might see it as a weakness. His gaze slithered down Lucius's chest and locked on his groin. It was as if Potter's hands were already tearing open the buttons on his trousers with his mouth pushing in close behind. Lucius took a very firm grip on his own expression. 

And then Potter reached out. A few silvery streaks of scar tissue on his hands caught the light as he unthreaded Lucius's belt buckle and worked the buttons beneath it open. He avoided Lucius's gaze as he did it, but over the rim of his glasses, his eyelashes blinked very quickly and the tip of his tongue peeked out between his lips. 

The blood was gushing down into Lucius's lap so loudly that it had to be audible. "Hardly novel," he managed to say over the top of it. "In fact, tending more towards the obvious."

"You won't have any complaints," Potter promised - and Lucius appreciated the plain diction that enabled him to say that without the slightest note of vanity. "I've never met a man who didn't like a willing mouth better than anything, and I get off on doing it." 

He rubbed his knuckles over the swell of flesh beneath Lucius's undershorts. With a great deal of effort, Lucius glued his thighs to the seat and held himself back from thrusting up into the touch. Sex was a currency of negotiation like any other. He acknowledged to himself that he could not afford to fall out of practice again. When Potter drew his lower lip into his mouth, tossed his glasses onto the far end of the couch and leaned down, he regretted his lack of practice even more keenly. 

Even through a layer of cloth, Potter's mouth was searing. With a muffled murmur, he sought out the length of Lucius's shaft and ran his parted lips along it, his teeth dragging hard over its tip. His breath seeped insistently into Lucius's undershorts, bathing the whole of his groin in wet heat. All the senses primed earlier by the ancient wand turned hair-trigger again. His heart kicked out hard against his ribs with every pulse.

By the time that Potter, full-mouthed and hungry for more, hooked his fingers into the top of Lucius's undershorts, their bodies were straining toward the same aim. Lucius tilted his hips up to let his underwear slide down his thighs - and that was as far as Potter's patience extended. He twisted to get his shoulders on the most effective angle and he buried his face in Lucius's cock.

It was extraordinary - the precise opposite of the ostentatious technique Lucius had expected. Potter simply wrenched his jaw open, nose and mouth and tongue working furiously, bathing his cock in warm breath and growing less and less sated with every moment. He sucked in deep lungfuls of air with his mouth pressed against the musty base of Lucius's shaft, which kept him far too occupied to notice how it made Lucius's eyes drift helplessly closed. Lucius had never seen such a single-minded display of desire. It was as if Potter's world had contracted to the one purpose of immersing all of his senses in Lucius's cock. When he finally seemed satisfied with that introduction, with the same determination he set himself to the task of giving pleasure. 

As Potter drew back, moistened his lips, and slowly lowered himself, Lucius's cock gave a treacherous twitch of impatience. Potter followed the movement and caught it in his mouth - wet fullness of his lips absorbing the tip and sucking gently. Lucius's lower ribs pulled tight enough to creak as Potter slowly pushed down his shaft, pressing the foreskin back until the tender head butted over the ridge at the top of his mouth. For a long time, he held Lucius in the limbo between need and satisfaction, doing no more than suck languidly, lips working back and forwards over the head, tongue making the occasional rough swipe. The sound of him was nearly enough to drive Lucius over the edge, the wet sucking of this mouth and the fierce gusts of his breath as his head undulated gently in Lucius's lap.

When he shifted his touch up to the back of Potter's neck, Potter responded instantly to the signal. His pace turned purposeful and he forced his throat into deeper, faster thrusts. On the edge of losing control, Lucius dragged his gaze away from the black locks swinging wildly as he jerked up and down on Lucius's cock. He studied the glistening spatter of perspiration that grew on Potter's shoulders and flanks, startled to feel the dampness at his own temple release an answering droplet. Impulsively, he reached out, fingers running through Potter's messy hair until his palm came to rest over the side of Potter's face. Beneath it, the skin flexed with movement and the unshaven texture of Potter's cheek rubbed against him, masculine and undeniable.

Potter moaned around his mouthful and that thrust him into orgasm, fingers clenching thin as a skeleton on the couch arm as he rode it out, bucking up into Potter's hungry mouth. Swallowing easily, Potter kept up his firm rhythm until the last of Lucius’s pleasure was exhausted.

As Potter straightened, still on his knees, Lucius's eyes clung to the clench of muscle in his throat as he swallowed again, twisted the stiffness out of his neck and cleared his throat. His head still light with pleasure, Lucius was no longer inclined to risk the hazards of conversation. Before Potter could speak, he worked the toe of his boot deliberately between Potter's thighs. As his knees parted for him, he let the smooth leather caress the inside of his thighs. Potter looked as if he was fighting a whimper. Back and forth, Lucius shifted his foot, toe pushing up into the vulnerable flesh just behind Potter's balls: Potter rubbed back against that.

"Oh fuck!" Potter's glazed eyes blinked up needily. There was a pearly fleck of semen in the stubble by the corner of his lip that made Lucius' tongue twitch in his mouth. When Potter gently took his hand and guided it down, Lucius followed his lead. The heat of Potter's cock in his hand was shocking - it had been a very long time. His first few brutal strokes had Potter straining up towards him. Curious, Lucius loosened his fist and looked properly at Potter's heated length. Long and bulging at the head, Potter's cock bore the grotesque Muggle disfiguration he'd never seen in the flesh before: his legs tightened sympathetically as he dragged the pad of this thumb over the smooth, vulnerable head of it. Murmuring low in his throat, Potter leaned his forehead into Lucius's shoulder and closed his hand over Lucius's, guiding him into a firmer grip. 

"Rough as you like," Potter growled, gasping and jerking against him as Lucius's fingers squeezed. "Yes! Like that."

Caught up in the rapid gulp of Potter's breathing and the muffled words he murmured into Lucius's shoulder, Lucius gave him all the speed and force he needed. At the rougher stokes, Potter threw his head back dramatically. After all the night's negotiations, it was only now, distracted in the extremity of need, that Potter's defences seemed to falter. Stripped of his trademark glasses, he looked very young, uncertain and trusting with his bright eyes upturned in their compelling frame of damp black lashes. At the moment of orgasm, however, he retreated into privacy. Arched up into Lucius's hand, he slammed his eyes shut, lips curled in a grimace, and turned his face away. Afterwards, his only sound was the strained gasp of his breath.

Potter was a magnificently versatile political weapon, Lucius thought as he forced his protesting spine to straighten in the seat. Under all that supposed strength was an endearing vulnerability that presumably was what had prompted so many worthier wizards to sacrifice their lives for him. It was a power he would lose with his youth. Though Potter may have wielded it only unconsciously, Lucius had ideas about how to turn that power invincibly on the magical electorate.

At his feet, Potter was raking the hair out of his face, gradually regaining his breath. The muscle across his shoulders and chest glistened. Lucius would need to do a great deal more to bind Potter to him. A maverick at heart, Potter needed a very long rein to avoid self-destructive rebellion, but deeper than that would have to run an instinctive loyalty to bring him back Lucius, and to Lucius alone. Potter's hands were curled on his thighs now, as if fighting the temptation to fidget. His question was plain: was this the limit of what they were going to do together?

Lucius extracted his boot from between Potter's legs, its surface like the trouser leg above flecked with semen, and planted it between Potter's lower ribs. 

"Remove them."

Although Potter leaned forward over his task, under his curtain of hair the corner of his mouth curled into a smile. He worked with slow anticipation. The hasty spell Lucius had used to fasten them earlier should have been effortless to undo, but Potter took his time peeling it back, then he took each heel in turn securely in his hand and slipped his feet free. The solicitous stroke of his hands over Lucius's bare calf muscles was familiar now. Lucius allowed him this liberty, and more. Potter made his fingers familiar with the tendons of Lucius's feet, tracing the arch beneath them and the sensitive skin between each toe, and by the time Lucius stopped him, the arousal in his lap was already starting to pulse again. 

Lucius rose, stepping free of his trousers, and evaded Potter's presumptuous hands. As he approached the bed, he divested himself of his remaining clothes - with the certain knowledge of Potter's full attention, it took some discipline to resist the temptation to preen a little. Potter was only a few steps behind him as he settled in the middle of the bed, leaning back with his hands sinking into the black covers. 

He needn't have worried that moving to the bed might invite unwarranted intimacy. Without hesitation, Potter knelt on the bed beside him, bent down and captured Lucius's cock in his mouth again. Lucius fought down the burning in his knees and chest. Sex was sex, no matter whether your company was male or female, paid or willing. But the pace of Potter's desire - the sudden swings it produced in his own body between calm and arousal - were catching him off guard. Even now, Potter's practised mouth was loosening his control; he caught himself thrusting up in search of another punishing graze of teeth and forced himself still. He clenched his hand into Potter's hair, deep into the thick, damp roots of it, to slow his rhythm. That made Potter moan: an enticing, deadly vibration. 

"Enough."

At Lucius's command, Potter slid back and off the bed. Back turned, he fumbled around in the top drawer of the bedside chest. That was the trouble with Potter. He lingered. The force of his attention slicked the skin like perfume and refused to be forgotten. His absence chilled the flesh and left an ache in the lungs. Lucius curled his fingers around his shaft and watched as Potter's fingers, shiny with grease, followed the crease between his buttocks and slipped inside his entrance, penetrating and stretching. Lucius whipped his hand away and thrust it back into the sheets, too close already, but the wanton display was spell-binding. 

The throbbing between Lucius's legs only grew in the tortuous wait before Potter turned, eyes darkly intent, and crawled back onto the bed. Gone was the playfulness he’d begun with: now Potter looked ravenous. He stretched out one glittering hand and engulfed Lucius’s cock in it: a hard, bony grip softened with the silky warmth of lubricant. Lucius’s lips parted involuntarily and Potter took immediate advantage. Under the distraction of another firm stroke, snake-quick, he planted a wet kiss on Lucius's mouth. It was over too soon for objection, his tongue slipping between Lucius’s lips then vanishing. And again, he lingered. Potter's taste - young flesh and alcohol and the salt of sex - seeped into Lucius's mouth and nose. His cock surged in Potter's fist and its pulse throbbed through his whole body.

Roughly, Lucius pushed Potter backwards onto the bed. Potter complied, drawing his legs up, inviting and slightly apart. It appeared he was about to throw himself into the act of being fucked with the same intensity he applied to everything else. When Lucius's cock brushed over his own, he drove his head back into the covers and growled.

He had witnessed Potter under torture before: younger, prouder, less resigned to the prospect of helplessness. There was little difference between the extremes of pain and pleasure on him. Mouth wide open, teeth showing, head thrown back, he could be reliving the Cruciatus, except that every third breath or so he demanded more. 

"Yes," he hissed as Lucius first breached his body, making him press his hips up hungrily into the invasion. "Oh god, yes." Not much later, pulling strands of white hair free of their ties so that they swept over his chest, he got his mouth around Lucius's name, and whispered it, trailing the ends of Lucius's hair across his face. "Lucius - oh fuck - I need ... I need - Lucius!" 

His steady stream of entreaty was as guileless as it was captivating. Courtesans carried a tailored range of moans and endearments like a tradesman's bag of tools, and an excess of enthusiasm was unseemly on a wife. Potter's greedy demands stirred him shamelessly. Every time his mouth shaped the word "please", lips sticking dryly on the P, tip of his tongue curling slowly on the L, Lucius fought the unlikely urge to lean down and kiss him. 

"Harder, Lucius - _hurt me,_ " he cried out abruptly, and that brought Lucius so close to release he came to a cruel, sudden halt. Unsurprisingly, Potter lifted his fingers to brush Lucius's lips and looked him square in the eye as he blurted, "For god's sake, don't stop!"

Lucius jerked his head away. "Turn over."

With a curious quirk of lips, Potter obeyed, supporting himself on four limbs that trembled slightly as they took his weight. 

Oh, Lucius had been on the upper end of helplessness often enough, he knew countless ways to relish a man's surrender, but he could remember no sight as endearingly vulnerable as Potter's rear turned to him, thighs shamelessly spread with his balls hanging heavily between them and the rim of his arsehole gaping darkly. There could be no greater surrender than a man in this position: if he'd suspected it earlier, he might have been drawn to experimentation. When Lucius ran a cool fingertip over his entrance, Potter shuddered as if, for the first time, taken by surprise. Repeating the action, slowly tracing the hot and swollen flesh, reduced him to a low, bestial moan. Lucius continued, intrigued, working his own arousal lightly as he traced the circumference of Potter's channel with one leisurely finger, penetrating and withdrawing. It was a miracle Potter's fingers clenching in the sheets didn't tear them.

"Please!" Potter whispered raggedly, nothing else. 

That word in Potter's mouth worked like a firm stroke on his cock. He wedged his knees deep between Potter's and pulled him upright, legs splayed and straining as they stretched apart over Lucius's thighs. Then he drew Potter back into his lap, steadying his cock with his free hand as Potter sank onto it. The agony in his knees brought him unassailable control. His hands roamed freely over Potter's chest, reaching around to graze a very interested nipple while his other hand explored the clenched planes of muscle across his stomach. One hand plunged lower to squeeze Potter's leaking cock in a grip that brought promise without relief; his thumbnail teased the unprotected slit in its head until Potter moaned again. 

Potter writhed frantically at the touch, making delicious spasms around Lucius's cock as his toes and knees scrabbled for some purchase in the sheets, finding none. Slippery with their mingled sweat, Potter's back glided against his chest, filling the air between them with a mist of escaped magic and intoxicating youthful pheromones. As Potter bucked again, his low, tearing growl vibrated in Lucius's ribs. 

"Gently, Potter," Lucius murmured into the tangled hair at the back of his neck, biting. Potter's resistance stilled at that, his chest still heaving in the confines of Lucius's arms. 

Slowly, Potter bent his head back, straining until the tendons in his throat emerged thin as wires, his eyes wild and fierce and rapturous. With a sudden piercing pain just behind his ribs, Lucius acknowledged that his own desire was only a fraction less desperate. 

"Lucius, you have to fuck me," Potter snarled, broken, dangerous against his ear. "You have to fuck me now."

Lucius did, with a hunger of which he would not have thought himself capable. Thrown forward onto his hands, Potter braced himself against the onslaught, no longer bucking back against each thrust but holding himself still, easing his shoulders down and his legs apart. There was an erotically tremulous edge to Potter's breathing, a plea, an incitement, and his cry when he came sounded torn from him. Potter's body was resisting now, tightening around him, and that sweet reluctance fired him into harder, faster thrusts. 

Lucius had paid whores who learned elegance in Paris, deportment in Tokyo and erotic arts in the seediest basements of Bangkok, who earned more by the hour than the Minister and deserved every Knut of it, but none of them held a candle to Potter in this moment, spread out before him in a beautiful bow of taut muscle, raw and hurting and still opening himself up for more. How had he failed to notice before the perfection of a man's back and shoulders, stretched out like a diver about to take flight, equal parts power and loveliness? Potter tipped his head back and wrenched Lucius's name out of his throat one last time. 

When his orgasm washed over him - not a neat release at all but a roiling, thundering wave - he let it carry him, blind and deaf, throwing him over Potter's body, hurtling, rock-heavy, until the sensation of tumbling receded to the quick rise and fall of Potter's chest underneath him. As the shuddering finally released him, he shifted his weight so that Potter bore all of it. That was a quiet pleasure he had not anticipated: Potter willingly trapped and impaled beneath him with Lucius's hair falling loose over his shoulders, his forehead resting on Lucius's outstretched hand, eyes screwed shut, mouth still panting. Lucius rested like that for a long while, limbs sluggish, absorbing the breaths and the heartbeats of the body beneath him. 

When Lucius finally eased himself free and rolled away, Potter stirred, sighing a whimpering note. His heavy lashes fluttered open, irises gem-bright behind them. With his stormcloud of tangled hair and all his naked, sweat-lit skin, he seemed unnaturally alive. The magic crackled off him. As the euphoria of orgasm sank towards blissful sleep, Lucius's last thought was to wonder what it would be like to draw Potter to him and possess all that youth and grace and fierce power in the span of his arms. But his mind was already losing its sharpness. Through half-closed eyes, he saw Potter raise his head and free his hand from the bedclothes as if to reach out, but unconsciousness overcame him.

*

Potter was out cold when Lucius slipped from the bed. Faint light was breaking through the highest windows, enough to show him the ghostly blur of his own body in the standing mirror as he passed. He looked like a stranger, brutally wide around the shoulders with wild hair trailing behind him. Silently, he sought out his clothes. His shirt flew into his hand. With a spell that was barely more than a thought, his boots moulded themselves one by one around his feet and fastened themselves tight. 

On the bed, Potter's back rose and fell evenly. He slept motionlessly, as if he had held back so little of himself from their night's coupling that he had no energy to spare for dreams. Lucius, on the other hand, felt anything but spent. His senses still heightened from the night before, his nerves jangled hungrily, imagining the pleasure of taking Potter again, his body this time yielding and tender with sleep.

It occurred to him that there was nothing he couldn't do to Potter in this moment. The wand shard in the reliquary would sharpen any spell in Lucius's vast and lethal repertoire. Death, madness, disfigurement ... Lucius could leave Potter's broken body as a mark of his revenge upon the nation he had planned to turn his back on. 

And yet Lucius's credo was and always had been the superiority of magic. There was a great deal in this young man of what defined a wizard and distinguished him from beasts. The untameable magical impulse he remembered from his very first days with the Death Eaters had its echo in Potter's determination. There was much about him that was beyond control. Beneath the surface simmered emotional instincts that the young man still had not learned to recognise, let alone harness. It made him powerful; it made him vulnerable. It remained to be seen whether Lucius could master it. 

Lucius drew his cloak from the hook by the door. The timepiece above the fireplace ticked over to eight o'clock.

He stood in the fireplace where the residual magic of the disconnected Floo would mask his illicit spell and Apparated not to the Manor, where he would be expected, but back to the post office in Hogsmeade and from there, by Floo, directly to the Ministry. There was a conversation he had long considered initiating with Cornelius Fudge, one which only the perfect combination of bluffing and veiled menace would turn in his favour. This morning, it would be child's play.

As he crossed the main lobby at the Ministry, heels echoing on marble, he repaired one last rent in his sleeve and tied back his hair. Apart from the indelible lingering taste on the back of his tongue, there was nothing to recall his carnal pursuits of the night before. 

There would, of course, be practical obstacles to reinitiating contact with Potter, should Lucius find a use for him. However, on reflection, he thought it likely that Potter would seek him out, probably sooner rather than later. He made a note to work a few more unexpected hexes into the Manor's defences. Something classical, old-fashioned and thoroughly unpleasant. Potter was bound to appreciate the challenge. 

**


	2. Novitiate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks a million to this chapter's three fantastic betas - empress_jae, absynthedrinker and pingrid

When Potter arrived, Lucius was in the Persian room on the top floor, patiently applying the domestic sealing spells with which the last seven months had made him wearily familiar, in an effort to stem the trickle of rain that seeped in around the window frame and left the carpet rotting with damp. 

A flicker in the wards outside the old crypt announced a presence, and Lucius looked through the window just in time to see the crypt door closing behind Potter as he descended into the tunnel. By the time he had emerged in the basement and made his way up through the kitchens, Lucius was ready to greet him from his tall-backed leather chair in the library. In a liaison like this one, appearances became more important, not less. 

Whether the meeting had gone well or badly was unreadable in Potter’s scowl as he swept his dripping hair out of his eyes. 

“What a welcome,” he spat from the doorway. 

“What route did you take?”

“Is every plant in your garden a man-eater? I thought I was going to lose more than just my shoelaces.”

“Answer me, Potter. What route did you take? You would be a fool to underestimate either the depth of Cornelius’s paranoia or the reach of his arm, and I have no use for a fool.” 

A firm hand was another necessity, especially with Potter. Framed by gleaming black hair, his eyes glittered.

“Yes, I came the way we agreed. Train to Richmond, Apparition to Hampton, Portkey and one more Apparition, wandless. There’s no way even a competent Minister could trace that.” He shrugged his wet cloak off and hung it on the stand behind the door. “Besides, if the journey didn’t lose them, I doubt they’ll make it through your gardens alive.” 

Halfway across the room, Potter stopped and leaned against an armchair, perhaps alert to Lucius’s displeasure. He didn’t, however, sit. 

“There is brandy in the armoire. Your journey appears to have left you thirsty.”

Unasked, Potter poured two. Lucius swept a disinterested glance over the glass Potter placed by his elbow, and finally his guest retired to the armchair and slouched into it. Potter’s gaze flicked distractedly over the room, although given the depth of the Ministry’s attentions to the Manor, it held nothing of sufficient notoriety to pique his interest. 

“Do I take it you have no observations on this evening’s events?”

“Like what?” Potter said with a shrug, inspecting his glass. “You’ve been to these things before. You know what happens.”

His jaw propped out very slightly in obstinacy. There would be room in their dealings for indulgence, but not at this delicate stage. Folding his hands in his lap, Lucius waited: silence was a weapon of its own, and probably a foreign one to Potter’s direct nature. Potter twisted his glass in his hand and gulped from it. Lucius waited.

“What? It was just a lot of talk. Sweet Circe, those people! All they did was argue about money. Funding for new curtains in the children’s ward. Funding for splinch wound research. Pay rises for the Welcome Witches. It was like they were a bloody bank, not a hospital.”

“Is that all?”

“Pretty much.”

“Potter, I have not arranged this appointment merely to occupy your free evenings. Think carefully. Was there more?”

Potter took off his glasses and wiped them on the dry inside hem of his robe sleeve. He looked drained without them, as if an evening of sitting still and listening had pushed him to the end of his endurance. 

“Right at the end they talked about choosing a new head of Emergency Healing,” he replied finally. “And the co-operative development program.” 

“Ah.”

Potter looked up quickly and slid his glasses back on. “The development program? What’s wrong with that? Lucius?”

Lucius unfolded his arms and sipped pensively from his glass. “You can see no risk in allowing Muggle physicians to study at St Mungo’s?”

“It's the one field where both worlds can learn from each other. You can't tell me that's dangerous.”

“Is that so?” The struggle to anticipate Lucius’s objection played out on Potter’s brow. “How do you imagine that the proposed training positions will be distributed by the Muggle health administration? When a technique acquired at St Mungo’s might put a physician strides ahead of his peers, who but the most well-connected and ambitious of the profession could hope to obtain a post? And how do you suppose they will behave, these triumphant men accustomed to the more ruthless politics of their enormous Muggle hospitals, once they are installed at St Mungo’s?”

Potter was nodding slowly: ambition and power at least were familiar concepts to him. “So we have to act now, to set the rules so the positions go to the right people.”

“What a pleasant thought. However, only one calibre of candidate will come forward. The program must be ended.”

“Certainly,” Potter snapped, rising. “I’ll just sort that out at the next board meeting, shall I?”

Lucius watched the temper in him ease as he returned to the armoire and refilled his glass. “It can be done. You will not be expected to do it alone.”

When Potter held up the decanter, he nodded once. As Potter lifted Lucius's glass and poured, the smell of dampness rose from him. The drape of his clothes seemed unnecessarily haggard. A flutter of Lucius’s fingers left them dry, and Potter sighed quietly. 

“As you have grasped,” he continued more gently, “St Mungo’s priorities are governed by Galleons. It is merely a question of diverting the funding elsewhere. Several of the Healers on the board have cherished projects of their own. Your support will help one of them rise to the top of the heap. That is all.” 

Rather than returning to his seat, Potter laid the decanter on the table at Lucius’s side. “Easy as that, is it?” There was a thread of petulance in his tone; he would have to lose it before he could ascend the heights to which they both aspired.

“Tomorrow, you will write several letters expressing gratitude for the welcome you received at your first board meeting. Your correspondence will politely touch on other matters. From there, you will need to apply the instincts that have brought you this far.” 

Potter laid his arm across the back of Lucius’s chair. “And in the meantime?” he said with the beginnings of a smile.

“In the meantime, you will need a good night’s sleep.”

Potter’s fingertip travelled around the inside of Lucius’s collar. 

“In your own home. I will not permit you to treat this pursuit idly. St Mungo’s is nothing but a charity. Next Thursday, the Hogwarts Board will eat you alive. Every member of that board is there for one reason and one reason alone: to keep a grip on the future of magical Britain. Some are benign. Some merely think they are benign. Others are your enemies. If you do not pay attention to every word that is said, you will find your name attached to proposals of which you hadn’t the slightest understanding. All of the significant ideological struggles of the last two centuries have played out through Hogwarts and you cannot afford to let them pass you by. You will become familiar with the workings of these committees or you will abandon your ambitions for power. Am I understood?”

Potter withdrew from Lucius’s side, his expression carefully blank. At the door, he turned. 

“Goodnight then.”He draped his cloak over his arm and smoothed it down. “Try for a warmer welcome next time, will you? Wouldn’t want me to lose interest completely.” 

A few moments later, he sauntered back into the doorway. “By the way," he said coolly. "Dawlish got discharged yesterday. After all those procedures, his face is holding together, though chances are he’ll never get his sight back. Thought you’d like to know.”

Some time later, when Potter had emerged from the crypt and disappeared among the willows, Lucius began to sketch out the contents of those letters. For such a celebrated young man, Potter was surprisingly tender towards criticism. That was useful. The deeper problem was his impatience with political mechanics. For Potter’s own sake, he sincerely hoped it could be cured. 

**

While Borgin was gone, Lucius had a few moments’ solitude. Disinterested in the trifles in the shop’s public display, he reviewed his strategy for the conversation ahead. His name was an instant liability and the few people he would once have considered allies were dead, estranged or on the run. Blackmail was a treacherous resource. The most valuable currency he had was promises, and he had already had to dispense those too freely. 

“Well naturally, Lucius, I’m a reasonable man,” Cornelius had informed him, almost three weeks ago to the day, wearing the slightly strangled smile of a cornered man casting about for an unlikely escape route. “However, your _reputation_ makes certain indulgences impossible.”

Across the vast expanse of the Minister’s desk, Lucius had given him an understanding smile, one statesman to another. “Reputations are the concerns of gossip-mongers. As men of the law, we concern ourselves with facts, do we not? And it is a fact that my intentions in the Department of Mysteries on that ill-fated evening were not malicious.”

“Yes, so you _say,_ Lucius.” Cornelius had pulled a document towards him, graced it with a distracted half-second of his ministerial attention, and pushed it away again.

“So I said at the time, Minister. As you will recall. You understood my plan to draw Potter to the Ministry building. To expose his disloyalty by entrapping him into stealing from the Ministry. To rid you of his nuisance. If you had not understood my objectives at the time, you would surely not have provided the assistance of -“

“Yes, yes, yes,” Cornelius had swatted the incriminating memories away like flies. “But there is still the matter of the escape from Azkaban.”

“I made no escape.”

Against the pale blue velvet wallpaper of his office, Cornelius’s face had worn unnatural colour. “You– What, man? How on earth can you claim that?”

“Abduction is the proper description, Minister. I made no use of force. I had no wand. I was removed without my consent and held a virtual prisoner in my home for the duration of the hostilities.”

“That’s preposterous!”

Lucius had held his expression perfectly still, apart from a fractional tilt of his eyebrow. “And yet it is a fact.”

Throwing himself back in his chair, Cornelius had tapped an anxious quill against his chin. “Anything more than a token reduction in your parole term would raise a public outcry, you know. I won’t be moved on that.”

A complete release from his parole was what Lucius had once planned to extract; now his needs had become more subtle. “If there is no chance of something more, may I suggest that the conditions be relaxed a little? Unrestricted movement within Britain is not unreasonable, applying retroactively from yesterday. And a reduction in Auror inspections to no more than monthly. I would not hope to alter the constraints on my wand and my bank account.”

Observing the Ministry emblem on the wall behind the desk, out of the corner his eye Lucius had watched the quill hesitate over blank parchment. He had crossed his legs, to produce a faint, encouraging jingle. 

“My gratitude would not go unexpressed, Minister. Consider also that my increased mobility would allow me to reinitiate contact with my former colleagues, who I understand are causing you no inconsiderable hardship. You have few sources of information on their movements.”

The Minister of Magic had looked at him very hard then, as if perfectly aware he was standing so well framed in the jaws of a trap that he simply could not see it. As Lucius considered making explicit reference to the Pensieve in the Manor’s catacombs which recorded their discussions on the eve of the Ministry break-in, Cornelius's resistance had collapsed. 

“Very well, very well,” he had conceded in undisguised irritation. “But the inspections will have to be weekly. And that will be an end of the matter, do you understand?”

“Perfectly, Minister.” 

There had been genuine pleasure in Lucius’s smile. Since no specifics had been discussed, two of the three pouches in his pockets could remain there. 

“Mr Malfoy, is this what you had in mind?” Borgin brought an aroma of dust with him as he emerged from his shop’s back rooms. 

Lucius took what he held out, rolled it in his palm and held it up to the light. 

“Is the incantation recorded?”

Borgin looked as affronted as his obsequious demeanour allowed. “Naturally.”

“Speak it.”

When the shopkeeper did so, overcoming a nervous tremor, Lucius was satisfied. 

It was while he was counting out the agreed price that the door behind him rattled open and then firmly closed. He added the last of the coins, plus three extra Galleons for appearances, and drew his gloves back on.

Only as he neared the exit did he acknowledge the black-hooded figure by the doorway. 

“I take it you had no trouble in your journey,” he said, low but clear. 

“I know my way around,” replied Rabastan Lestrange evenly. “The question is, will the journey be worth it?”

**

He found Potter in the guest bedroom, where he had allowed him to sleep off the long journey from Hogwarts after he had recounted every remembered detail of the board meeting and received a brisk lesson in knowing when to keep his mouth shut. The young man was sleeping soundly, dark lashes motionless against his cheek. Lucius left the parcel on the chest of drawers, beside the discarded glasses, and slipped away.

He was in the conservatory feeding the Dragon Orchids when Potter came barefoot down the path, wrapped in a grey morning robe with the Malfoy crest on the pocket, dishevelled and still bearing the warm smell of sleep. He stopped by Lucius’s side, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet. 

“Should I thank you for this?” he enquired, holding out the object. 

“That would be courteous.”

In Potter’s hand was an ovoid case of cobalt blue enamel chased with intricate gold detailing: wreaths along the crown and golden vines winding along its hinges. 

“Thank you,” he murmured, eyes never leaving it. “It’s a Pandora egg, isn’t it?”

“Indeed.”

“Do you know how to open it?”

Lucius spared another moment for the orchids, wrenching off a yellowing leaf and slipping his hand out of the path of the answering burst of flame. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to hazard a guess?”

“If you like.” Potter’s answer did not lack a reckless edge of temptation. “It will defend itself without the right password, won't it? Manticore venom keeps its bite for hundreds of years.” 

As Potter tossed it and caught it, Lucius snipped off a live bud along with the withered ones. “There is no way to be certain of the defence mechanism. Choking gas, charmed darts – with so few of them left, they have become largely the domain of legend, and fanciful legend at that.” He laid down his shears. "But as it happens, the vendor was shrewd enough to obtain the incantation."

Even in the crisp morning sunshine, Potter's face darkened. "Borgin, was it? He knows I pay good money for that sort of thing. He should have come to me with it."

"Money is not the only sort of currency to influence a man like that."

Gently, Potter placed the egg on the bench seat. "Blackmail, was it? Good. He's a greasy little coward. He pretends he's trying to protect the old magic, but have a look in his shop. What's on display is always his nastiest goods - anything shrivelled or deadly. He wants to keep everyone afraid of dark magic. Fear keeps his prices up, and that's all he cares about." 

Potter had never been naive about his enemies; only his friends. His temper was inflamed, as it instantly became when one of his heartfelt beliefs was threatened. Contempt had drawn his mouth into a strong, muscular bow. And, watching his lips go still, and then soften, Lucius felt the mood between them shift. Potter's fingers closed around his shoulder. Above the tie of the morning robe, a triangle of bare skin rose, transmitting the tempo of the young man's breathing, the relaxed outline of his pectoral muscles and the sturdy shelf of his collar bone. 

When Lucius pulled the robe’s tie free in one lazy tug, Potter sighed from deep in his belly. Running his hands over Potter’s shoulder, he pushed the robe back completely and drew it down Potter’s arms to throw it over the bench. From a half-step away, Potter’s released scent rose up from all his bare skin, overcoming the garden's fragrance with the powdery smell of slumber and a sour trace of nervous sweat unwashed from the day before. Potter’s hands clasped casually behind his back as Lucius’s eyes ran over him. 

When Lucius reached out, it was only to lay a guiding hand over Potter’s hip and turn him away, facing towards the glass-paned wall of the conservatory. He dragged his knuckles lightly from the curve of Potter’s rear, skimming along his spine, and bit the back of his neck. Potter shuddered: so fetchingly demonstrative. 

“Go on,” he murmured, and Potter leaned forward to place his hands against the glass, understanding without question what Lucius had in mind. 

“Yes,” Potter groaned, arching his back as Lucius's hand sought out his swelling arousal. "That's good." Lucius threaded his fingers through the thick, coarse hair and kneaded firmly until Potter’s hands curled against the glass. The number of days since they had last touched counted themselves out in the steepness of Potter’s erection.

When Lucius’s fingers reached his entrance, his forearms collapsed against the glass and accepted the weight of his forehead.

“Shall I take that for approval?” Lucius asked and whipped around to snatch the jar of oil summoned by Potter’s clumsy wandless spell. He opened it slowly and dipped into it, drawing out the clammy sound of it. 

Only recently initiated into the art of anal penetration, he was developing a fascination for it. The unbalance of it appealed to him: the depth of consent it required from the other party; the extreme vulnerability; the power of his fingertips sheathed in muscle. Potter’s hips were bucking in time with his fingers now, jerking needily, sucking his fingers in as if to encourage him to give more. Stilling, he ignored Potter’s sigh of disappointment and let his free hand wander. He stroked the angle of Potter’s shoulder-blades, up and down his unprotected flank, over his deliciously clenched abdominals. 

“Has there been anybody else?” he asked with a twist of fingers that made Potter hiss.

“No,” came the irritable reply, grasping the question immediately. Another vicious twist made him gasp again. “A blow job behind the Three Broomsticks. I didn’t go looking for it.”

“And?”

“And that’s all. Merlin, it’s not as if I’m married to you.”

Satisfied, Lucius kept up his slow penetration as the tension rose right up Potter’s back. Then he opened his robes and gave himself the final few strokes he needed. 

As he steadied himself with his hand on Potter’s shoulder, Potter’s lips brushed his knuckles once and he turned his head back to the glass wall. There was resistance when Lucius entered him; Lucius gave him a handful of seconds to recover and drove himself fully in. Outside, the lawns were bathed in faint morning sun. There was a particular satisfaction in taking Potter here, with the carriageway and the whole south gardens stretching into the distance, taking him in full view of any unlikely visitors. Potter seemed to share the thrill: his hands on the glass had gathered a steamy white border and a bead of sweat trickled the length of his spine. If he knew how hungry Lucius was for him, he might have wielded his bargaining power to greater effect.

Instead, he opened himself up to Lucius’s thrusts, coming quick and deep now.

“Yes,” he hissed again, and at a particularly vicious stab, _“Lucius!”_

It was as it had been the first time. The sweetest moments came when Potter’s pleasure was passed, and with it his jerking desperation, and he gave his body up completely to Lucius’s use. 

**

He had observed the changes in the Ministry building on his previous visit, but foreknowledge hardly lessened the impact. In the Atrium, a neat stand supplied caffeine to a diminished and overstrained workforce. “All hours” the sign proclaimed brightly, depicting a huge, charmed plunger that poured into the bleakest morning hours. Most of the departments from the fifth and sixth levels had been closed or merged, leaving an entire storey free for the new Muggle Advisory Office. Gone were the days of lingering chats in the corridors or the lift lobbies. The new strips of safety enhancing fluorescent lights chased away the shadows from the private corners, and in any case, there was no longer time for conversation.

The high level Muggle Advisory contact to whom Cornelius had arranged for Lucius to impart his information laid a black mechanical device on the end of the table as she took her seat.

“Video camera,” she told him in an efficient tone that amounted to smugness. Her name was Emma Peck – he had never heard of the family – and she had brought back cutting-edge techniques from her five-year stint with the Muggle police in Toronto. “You don’t mind if I record our interview, do you? It ‘s for everyone's protection to keep an exact record.”

“By all means,” Lucius said pleasantly.

Her sleek auburn French twist seemed styled with a protractor and ruler. She might be too inexperienced to pose any threat to him. But if that were the case, she would be useless in providing him with the information he would need.

“You’re a Death Eater, according to your file. Lucky for you those convictions came before the Muggle Protection Act. You’d be doing life if you repeated them now.”

Either she was testing him out, or she simply had no idea who he was. He hoped for the latter; there was nothing so useful as being underestimated. “What a shame the Act was not conceived until the need for protecting the Muggle-born was all but past.” 

She tapped the sharp end of her pristine quill on the table. “The name you’ve given us. Flint. He’s just another lackey is he?”

“Not every fool has the capacity to rise to the dizzying heights of leadership.”

“Could he have been associated with Gregory Goyle, the saboteur?”

It sounded as if her entire knowledge of the coup and its aftermath came from file notes. After all, the fetish for destroying the hard-bitten traditions had demanded that the Muggle Advisory Office be made up almost entirely of recruits from outside the Ministry.

“I dare say he was acquainted with Gregory Goyle, the young fool who defaced the freedom monument one drunken weekend and wound up with an off-the-record death sentence. They were at school together.”

“Them and your son.”

Lucius blinked, once. “And my son. And countless others.”

There was a wedding band on her left hand, and a gold watch with the basic two hands peeped out under her cuff. Muggle-born and recently married to a Muggle, he guessed. Hence her contempt and her ignorance. From anyone less inferior, he might have found the disrespect a challenge to ignore.

“It’s no surprise you’ve come over,” she went on in what he presumed was a kindlier tone. “Your family doesn’t seem to have done so well out of the Death Eaters.”

“We were bit players,” he assured her smoothly. “Mere unfortunate casualties swept up in the gales of war.” And since that seemed to confirm a conclusion she had already come to, he went on. “Are there any subjects in particular on which you would like me to sound out my contacts?” 

She inflicted a long frown upon him and pressed a button on her video camera. “I want the leaders of the Death Eater movement. Can you give me that? All we seem to get is lackeys.” 

“I will make that my aim,” he promised, as if the Death Eaters these days consisted of anything more than lackeys led by yet more volatile lackeys.

“And I want information on the anti-building groups.” 

How very convenient. “Really? I wasn’t aware they were anything more than a few crotchety old women with too much time on their hands. What on earth could I find out about them that they don’t state openly in their daily letters to the press?”

“They are organised and destructive and far from harmless.” Under all that Muggle plainness, there was something hard in her, something that reminded Lucius very much of his dead sister-in-law. “They have twice brought magical London to a standstill. They will not be permitted to do it again.”

He offered her a sympathetic shrug. “An admirable goal, of course. However, as long as they stay within the bounds of the law, there’s very little the Ministry can do to deter them.”

Emma Peck’s quill abruptly stopped tapping. She closed the file with a slow air of finality. “You think so, do you Mr Malfoy?”

A salutary lesson in underestimation. She knew a good deal more than he had given her credit for. “Consider it done.”

When he offered his hand, in the Muggle fashion, she gripped it firmly and tilted her head as she considered him. “Goodbye, Mr Malfoy,” she said, distrust undisguised. “I look forward to our next meeting.”

He lingered in the corridor outside long enough to hear her cry of surprise when she opened the tape slot on her video camera and a butterfly flew out. 

**

If the stiffest and blackest of his day robes had been a little overstated for the Ministry's corridors, they were scarcely sufficient for his next meeting. Goblins were shrewd and unforgiving allies. It was ill-advised to appear before them without all the subtle symbols of wealth and power.

**

There were no rules about which sort of Muggles were allowed into the wizarding neighbourhoods because the fashionable philosophy insisted that there was only one class of Muggle and, within that class, all were equal. Returning very late from his meeting, slinking home through Caster Way and once again at the outer limits of his parole conditions, Lucius found himself in proximity with some of the unequal persuasion. By day, they could have been anything from bankers to bricklayers, but by night they were merely a small mob. And they were looking for trouble, elbowing into each other with pent-up ill-will that lacked only a viable target.

Lucius stepped unseen into the wreckage of the old Cleansweep site to let them pass, then turned and followed, keeping his slow steps close to the shadows. They should not be here at this hour. After the first year of Diagon Alley's opening, which had seen it become the favoured destination for the bravest forerunners of fashion, the early glittering visitors had moved on to where the pace of life was faster, and the traffic now was all second-class, the sort of dullard who moth-drifted to the faded aura of glamour in search of recycled celebrity. The fights had begun then, and the patchy attempts to stop them. And yet the gating of the entrances to the Alley nearest the Muggle drinking dens, the appearance at the Leaky Cauldron of Muggle security guards, and the almost comprehensive banning of magic within the Alley itself, had all failed to extinguish the problem. These ones must have found a forgotten way through the Kings Cross backstreets, drawn by the allure of the forbidden.

"'s empty! Where the fuck are they all?" They were quite drunk, drunk and acting drunker, in the way of the young that banished all possibility of responsibility or consequence.

Lucius slipped into the alcove of a doorway as they turned to scan the laneway, straining to see out of the dome of light cast by the high, glass-encased firelight above them. They would find magic aplenty if they continued their stroll in the direction of Diagon Alley. Lucius only hoped they would do it quickly, since his curiosity had already cost him the last five minutes of his free movement. He touched the Portkey at his belt and kept to the shadow.

"Here's one! That's got to be one. Either a magician or a fag."

The man coming towards the group, downhill from Diagon Alley, maintained his course. Tall, thin-shouldered, and not quite old enough to rise above this sort of baiting, his strut suggested that, were the numbers more favourable than four against one, he might have had something to say about it.

"So which is it?" They fanned out across the laneway like drilled footballers, so that even veering towards the far wall could not help him outflank them. "Magic tricks or shit-licking?"

They laughed. Foolhardy words, in any context, to utter to a wizard. But then Muggles were accustomed to superiority, and to cynicism, and it was said that most of them frankly dismissed the existence of magic. In their culture of omnipresent technological trickery, who could blame them? The wizard's thumb jerked as if contemplating his wand, but they were well within the prohibition zone that surrounded the cluster of licensed venues at the top end of Diagon Alley and the penalty for assault with magic had been very publicly raised to three years for a first offence. 

"If you don't mind," said the wizard, clutching the strap of his satchel and lengthening his stride, with his long face tilted down towards the damp cobblestones. 

"Hang about, sunshine. We're entitled to our–" the one in the puffed black jacket staggered slightly and lost his grip on his bottle, which clattered to the ground and rolled, "–to our ... Came here to see a show. Where's the fucking magic? Sunshine? Where's the whizbang fucking magic?"

With the untroubled ease of drunkenness, two sets of hands caught the wizard and threw him back.

"Let me past."

His voice faltered. There were four of them and they were closing around him. An expression of pure arrogance rippled over his face. I can beat you, it said, on your ground or on mine. With no further thought for his wand, he swung.

It was over quickly, four on one. A desperate surge of wandless magic threw one of them away from him, making him trip on the discarded bottle and hit the ground hard. But after that, angry now, they felled him with blows to the jaw, to the belly, a boot in the back of his knee. Hands scrabbling to fend off the rain of blows, he writhed on the cobblestones, far too dizzy for more magic. His jaw was split and one of his fingers twisted at an odd angle as he flailed with decreasing strength against the fierce attack. One last kick caught him behind the ear and he slumped unconscious. 

A boot, tip glistening with blood, rose over his head.

Lucius did two things in quick succession. With one hand, he unhooked the tobacco box from his belt and threw it towards the throng of assailants. With the other, he flung a Lumos charm alongside it. The flash of light caught the attention of the hindmost man, who turned around just in time to reach out reflexively and catch the box. With a cut-off cry, he vanished, exiled to the woods of Malfoy Manor where Lucius did not fancy his chances among the quicksand traps and the Vampire Willows and the Kappa pond. The remaining three froze. They appeared, quite suddenly, to realise that they were in an unknown laneway which was more shadow than light, and shadow which had just swallowed a man. With a distrustful glance at the unconscious wizard, one of them raised his boot again, but the others jerked him back, moving away from the source of danger, and dragged him struggling back towards whatever loose paling they had crawled in through.

Lucius did not, as it turned out, have to speak a word. He bent over the injured young man. Under the clotting blood, he was breathing. Lucius straightened his head to keep his airway clear and returned to the Floo. 

**

“If they offer me enough, I’ll do it,” Potter declared from the couch three days later, seeking distraction from the task of reading the magazine in his hands.

Lucius looked up from his letter. The young man's name had been Martin Bobbin, nephew of the eminent apothecary turned pharmaceutical magnate, and the photographs in the paper showed that, despite St Mungo's best efforts, his wounds were only just beginning to heal. Lucius had adopted a tone of modest reason, since a torrent of earlier letters had already whipped up both sides to feverish hyperbole.

“Short-term promotional campaigns do not befit a future minister. In any case, favouring one maker would alienate the others and the Ollerton family have diverse enough interests that you may, in a time of peril, require their support.” 

Potter was having one of his more thoughtful days. “So I’m just playing with them, am I?”

As he returned to the parchment, Lucius’s lips twitched. “You are offering them a chance to make your acquaintance and to consider an alliance that stops short of overt commitment.”

“Why Nimbus?” Potter persisted. “Because they’re Muggle-owned, is that it? You want me to show people I can deal with both sides.”

Lucius nodded, keeping a covert eye on the timepiece on the corner of his desk. 

“And if I want to get anywhere, I have to know how to stare down a huge corporation that isn’t used to a Minister who says no to them.” There was no fear in Potter’s observation, only a quality of anticipation that pleased Lucius far more than he let on. “Okay. So I need to tell them I’m flattered by the offer, but it would be insulting to choose me when there’s so many permanent players who deserve it. I only played one match last season anyway. Should I suggest another player who’d be good for them?”

“What do you think?”

A shrug in his voice, Potter concluded, “It never hurts to have someone owe you a favour.”

With a sigh, he closed the magazine and put it aside. Lucius erased the last line with a slash of his quill and wrote it out again.

“I’ll come and see you after the meeting,” Potter said brightly, standing. “Is there anything else before I go?”

“Go where?”

“I have to get ready. The party tonight.”

Only then did Lucius give his guest his undivided attention. “That won’t be possible. You have an appointment.”

That stopped Potter in his tracks. “I told you about this weeks ago. I can’t cancel it. My best friends are getting engaged. It’s important.”

“Leadership comes at a cost. You must prepare yourself for greater inconveniences than this.”

“I can’t miss it. I’ve hardly seen them all year.”

“And they have hardly seen you either, am I right?” 

The growing distance between Potter and his friends pre-dated Lucius’s involvement, that much he had gathered from Potter’s occasional terse references. Naturally, he withheld his opinion that the union between a low-blood and a no-blood was a meagre cause for celebration, and if anything was a waste of the Granger girl’s reputed intellect. Instead, Lucius pitched his case with careful, detached reason. Engaging Potter in a battle of wills was counterproductive; when cornered, he only loosened his grip on his scruples and fought at his most stubborn.

“Your absence can be atoned for with an extravagant gift. The opportunity I have arranged may not come again.”

“You expect me to choose, do you?” Potter said with a sneer that reminded Lucius not to underestimate his occasional pinpoint perspicacity.

“It appears you will have to.”

And he met Potter’s glare with the same cool curiosity.

The future of their enterprise teetered for a long moment. Then Potter’s chin turned up very slightly. “What’s so important then?”

**

If Potter was aware of his striking physical appeal, it quickly became clear that he had spent his life trying to obscure it rather than turning it to his advantage. He fidgeted in the tailored robes that framed the athletic span of his shoulders, clinging tighter than they had on Draco. 

"I look like-" he snarled, and then glanced at Lucius in the mirror. “It doesn’t look like me.”

Lucius shortened the sleeves a little.

“Image is paramount in a democracy. You will have to get used to a more formal style of dress. Your hair you may leave untouched for now. Anything neater would look contrived.”

He leaned away from Potter’s fingers skimming the side of his neck. “Tonight of all nights will require perfect concentration. You will be judged by invaluable allies and dangerous enemies.”

Lucius held the robes closed and searched among the pinprick hazards in the velvet lined box for an appropriate ornament. 

“And I’m supposed to show them what?” Potter asked. 

There. A silver dragon pin with a line of small rubies crowning the ridges of its thorny tail: opulent but not ostentatious. 

“That you can be trusted.”

Potter let him fasten the pin and supply him with a pair of square-heeled boots and a silver ring. 

In the mirror, Potter stood straighter, shoulders pulled back as the robes' severe lines demanded. It was all too easy to forget that he belonged to the generation that spent afternoons lounging at the front tables of fast food outlets with fingers dangling factory made cigarettes. Potter's qualities were timeless, rocks unmoved by the tides of fashion. He held himself like a man who intended to force the boundaries of possibility. In his unwavering gaze was a quiet potency, as if it were only a matter of will to seize the hand of Fate and write his own destiny. And that brought Lucius to a startling moment of revelation. If some twist of timelines had brought Potter into the orbit of a younger Lucius Malfoy – in his early twenties, before marriage, duty and Lord Voldemort had finally freed him from his father's shadow – he would have fallen into Potter's thrall and found himself outmatched.

Examining the seal on the ring, Potter scowled. “What the hell’s this? I’m not going in there looking like I _belong_ to you.”

“That is not a disadvantage in this company,” Lucius told him, sharper than intended.

Potter took the ring off and left it on the dresser. 

**

By the close of the final course, Potter had acquitted himself if not with flourish then with apt conservatism, carefully choosing details from his board meetings that could credibly have been sourced elsewhere and injecting them into the conversation. He had covertly followed Lucius’s lead on the etiquette of the goblin dining table, and gone sparingly with the wine. Their host’s strategy of separating mentor and protégé by four seats had done them no harm. 

Finding himself between the host’s sister and his rather obnoxious grandson played to Lucius’s advantage. The younger goblin’s opinionated commentary on everything from economics to the Ilfracombe Incident to the portable telephone allowed Lucius to keep an observant ear on the surrounding conversations. 

“Meddok has studied in Berlin,” said the sister, by way of boast as much as apology, as they moved to the gallery for drinks. “He has some very modern ideas.”

“There’s nothing modern about recognising superiority where it’s proven, Friga,” said the over-educated young goblin. “We’ve lived in uninterrupted peace since 1791. Prosperity is in the goblin’s nature. The love of war comes from contaminated blood, so the scholars say, and we keep ours pure.” He sent a sharp-toothed smile Lucius's way. “A sentiment you should respect.”

Collecting another glass of wine, Lucius chose a low seat that reduced his height advantage to a politer level, but Meddok promisingly remained standing. Dark hair and eyes, even for a goblin. His mother must have come from the east.

“Now that we’ve got our wands back,” the goblin went on, ignoring Lucius’s silence,“recognition will follow.”

The glee of this younger generation reminded Lucius of the worst of the Muggle-born boys at Hogwarts, for whom magic had been first and foremost a new way to inflict submission on the weak. The young goblins also tended to forget that their wand use remained illegal in most circumstances, even if a conciliatory Ministry chose to turn a blind eye. 

Lucius displayed mild curiosity. “I understood that goblin magic had its limitations.”

“It's as powerful as yours,” Meddok spat back. 

Passing his companion a full glass from the table, Lucius navigated his course carefully. “Potency I grant you. But I have seen the magic of wizards in the most extreme conditions, and I am reluctant to believe it can be equalled.” 

It was the goblin’s gaze, not Lucius’s, that flicked to where Potter stood. 

“Complacency,” the young goblin growled, but allowed Lucius to steer the conversation toward the state of the Galleon instead. 

By the time that seed sprouted, Lucius had manoeuvred his way to the fireplace where Gringotts’ head of debt collection was conferring with their host. The Chairman, who had youthful memories of Lucius's great-grandfather, was bowed with age but compensated with an extreme of gravitas. Under the grandfatherly white hair watched dark eyes that missed nothing. Few of his own kind cared to contradict him; outsiders did so at their peril. 

At the crash of breaking glass, every head in the room turned. At the centre of it all stood Meddok. Potter’s glass lay smashed on the floor and his shoulders flexed with a menace Lucius had not seen for some time. The Chairman glanced at Lucius instantly, knowledge and amusement in his eyes, and Lucius mirrored the expression.

“Where are those famous reflexes?” Meddok was saying. “Didn’t see that coming, did you?”

A flutter in the glass fragments scattered light onto the walls, before Potter mastered his angry magic and drew it back in. “I didn’t expect an attack in the middle of a party, no.”

“Or maybe your reputation's beaten up. After fifty years of political chaos, I guess you wizards need something to be proud of.” A small murmur of objection rippled over the room, and a smaller wave of cautious approval.

“Is that so?”Potter replied. Behind the commendably cool tone, he shifted his footing as if locating the weight of his wand among the unfamiliar robes. 

“Let's look at the facts. You duelled a wizard who’d died once already. And the best you could come up with was a disarming spell. For a goblin, it takes a bit more than that to make a hero.”

Potter’s snort of laughter was exactly the right and the wrong response. “I’d have let you have a go at Voldemort first if you’d put your hand up. Where were you? I was at Gringotts once – I don't remember seeing you there.”

The goblin struck suddenly – a flick of his arm releasing his wand from his sleeve and casting a firm, practised hex. With a hand on his undrawn wand, Potter set off a shielding charm that sent the ornaments on the mantelpiece rattling. The hex, sent awry into the wallpaper, produced a springing white daisy.

Meddok braced himself not to step back. Rash though he was, he did not lack the unshakable dignity of his race. “Let’s take this outside, shall we?”

For a moment, Potter looked as if he thought the courteous option might be refusal. His gaze only had to brush over Lucius’s to correct his misconception.

The Chairman’s house was built into the lower slopes of the mountains and, from opposing ends of its long front porch, Potter and his opponent faced off over the sweep of dark farmland and bright specks of villages below. Neither of them acknowledged the crowd that spread out around them on the sheltered side of the porch.

“Genoa Rules?” Potter asked as he drew. 

The goblin planted his feet apart and laughed. “No rules.”

“Suits me fine.”

And that gave Lucius his first inkling of doubt. Surely Potter understood the political consequences of injuring the cherished grandson of a powerful patriarch. No such understanding was apparent in his first spell, which narrowly missed the goblin’s ear and sent an ornamental fig smouldering in its pot. 

_“Tantellegra!”_ he continued, his second attack deflected with a silvery burst of light. And then the duel began in earnest. 

It was a rare opportunity to see goblin magic at work. The goblins’ arsenal used unfamiliar spells, hard and guttural in their own tongue. Under the first attack, Potter fell back clumsily, obviously missing the split-second advantage of recognising the spell as it was cast. He seemed a fraction slower than Lucius remembered him at his best. He blocked a spell inches from his forehead – aimed iconoclastically at the famous scar – and another aimed lower. The next one which he sidestepped knocked over another fig, but its successor turned a statue into glass and hurled it shattering onto the lawn. Increasingly, Potter defended, simply casting one shielding charm after another as Meddok’s spells became increasingly destructive and the confident angle of Potter’s wand began to droop. 

“Is that all you’ve got?” Meddok called out, throwing something that splattered into red sparks against Potter's shielding charm.

And that was Lucius’s second misgiving. Potter did not appear to be trying. He made an excellent demonstration of defending himself with scarcely a movement of his lips or his wand, and yet the fire was missing, the fierce will and speed of which Lucius had first-hand experience. Reluctantly though Potter may have come here, Lucius credited him with sufficient bluntness not to express his displeasure by sabotaging their prospects of success. However, Potter was faltering, the shield retracting closer and closer to his body so that the spells’ impact ruffled his hair.

“Until you learn to aim, I won’t need anything harder,” Potter replied evenly, and flicked off a severing hex that sliced open the marble beside the goblin’s feet. 

But his wand was clenched right up against his chest now, and Lucius could feel the Chairman’s attention on his cheek. The crowd began to rustle with muttered observations, as though smelling blood. Lucius sipped his wine with a display of nonchalance he did not feel.

Potter’s last act of self-protection was fending off the blazing stump of the fig tree that came hurtling towards him. Righting himself, he turned one unhurried look upon Lucius – and heaven help them both, it was that reckless, invincible expression that made Lucius’s palms sting with foreboding. Then he twisted back to face his opponent and in that very act he stepped right into the path of a spell that struck him square in the shoulder. Knocked into the air, Potter landed hard on his back, polished boots sprawled in the air. Lucius watched his champion drag himself slowly upright, throwing up yet another wavering shielding charm as he stretched the pain out of his spine and ran his fingertips over the scorched cloth and flesh where the blow had fallen. 

“Ready to concede?” Meddok said. “You’re keeping these good goblins away from their drinks.”

Potter took a long, slow breath and sheathed his wand. 

“Already?” his opponent scoffed.

“Not quite.”

The flirtatious display of pyromancy Lucius had witnessed at their first meeting had not stretched his mind to the possibility of what happened next. Potter reached out one hand and, pinching his fingers together, pulled, and where he pulled, a tuft of flame rose up from the ground, waist high. At the delicate command of Potter’s fingertips, the fire swelled and spread out, flowing in a blazing circle around the goblin’s legs.

Meddok’s sneer faltered. Sweat breaking out on his brow, he conjured up a shower of rock that fell onto the flames, but Potter just poured more of his power into the spell, eyes drifting closed as the tendons strained down his neck and along his wrist. With a deep hiss, the rocks dripped into molten red puddles at the goblin’s feet. The flames surged redder, higher and the first spell Meddok sent through them skidded harmlessly to the ground like a felled pigeon. Meddok wiped his wand hand against his robe and gripped it tighter. His face was dark and glistening in the shoulder-high conflagration. Potter’s eyes, behind the flame-washed lenses, were unreadable.

The goblin stood up straighter when Potter drew his wand again, as if conquering the urge to flinch. A murmured word, a flick of the wrist, and Potter’s wand had grown a swirling tail of fire, curling for metres out in front of him. It whispered and slithered against the marble, mingling with the indrawn breath of the audience. 

Lucius’s heart thumped against his breastbone. A chance stroke of genius. Goblins held a special reverence for fire, built over their old centuries at the forge. He did not need to glance around to know that the Chairman’s eyes would be wide and still, reflecting the light of Potter’s whip. 

Potter gave the burning whip an authoritative flick. It wound itself around Meddok’s ankle and the goblin screamed, his own wand slashing at the air. And it was only his ankle, not his neck.

“Enough!” the Chairman ordered instantly, and every trace of flame had been extinguished before the echo of his words had quite faded. “I prefer both my home and my grandson intact, if you please.” 

Despite Lucius’s wary eye on him, the younger goblin’s modern ideals did not seem to have subverted his obedience to clan and patriarch. Sullenly, he allowed the companions who rushed to his side to help him to his feet and guide him back into the house. 

Sauntering up to Lucius’s elbow Potter looked a little more worn out than Lucius had seen him in a while, but the shoulder wound had almost stopped bleeding and the lazy power still crackling off him sent static into the hem of Lucius’s robes. Fire was Potter’s element and he wore it like a diadem.

“Well played,” the Chairman nodded. 

Lucius understood that the words were addressed equally to both of them. 

**

As they entered the Manor's library and shook off their outer robes, Potter’s hand latched firmly onto his forearm. Lucius caught the dark glint in his eye and did not pull away. 

“I know when I’m being used, Lucius. I’m not anybody’s weapon. Not anymore.”

It only took the lightest provocation to bring Potter’s defensive instincts to the surface. His arms and shoulders coiled subtly for combat. 

“No,” Lucius said, as if seeing it for the first time, and reached out to brush a slow thumb along his cheek. “You aren’t.”

Potter tensed further at the unaccustomed caress. 

“Come to bed, Harry.”

Those were words he had not uttered before, and the gentling of Potter's grip reflected that. There was no harm in a modest reward. Tonight, after all, Potter had come closer than ever to proving himself the man that Lucius required.

**


	3. Apostasy

Either Potter had been playing with life-or-death stakes for so long that his capacity for fear had been blunted, or he did not have the faintest suspicion of the consequences that would flow from his failure. 

"Forget it," he had just flung out, turning his bare back to Lucius to glance through the illicit contents of his cabinets. "There's hundreds of things wrong with this country. I can't fight all of them – I'll lose my mind before election day." Potter picked up a bone-handled dagger from his cabinet and weighed the hilt in his palm. "Anyway, it's one of the big issues that's likely to get me in – something like the Magical Assault laws. The first time a wizard gets locked up for defending himself with magic, it won't be pretty. What happened to Martin Bobbin has opened people's eyes, and even the softest of them won't stand for that." 

Drawing on his shirt and freeing his loose hair from it, Lucius enquired, "And you can guarantee, can you, to procure an offence, a prosecution and a conviction in the next eleven weeks?" 

Potter tossed the blade and caught it. "Maybe. I'll take the risk."

Some of Lucius’s projects depended in their very essence on Potter remaining unacquainted with all of the risks he faced. Nonetheless, a proportionate sense of fallibility was a rare and desirable gift in a young man of Potter’s age. Given the short lead-up to the close of nominations, Lucius had pulled every trick at his disposal – flattery, bargaining, carefully fabricated threats – to get Potter some of the trappings of leadership. Sitting on the boards of Hogwarts and St Mungo’s as well as personal invitations to the homes of the managers of Nimbus and Gringotts, these were rare privileges. Even Lucius, the youngest son of a vital and omnipresent father, had not passed comparable milestones at so tender an age. It remained to be seen, however, whether Potter had the skill to wield his newfound political weight.

Currently he was cutting an uninspiring figure, pacing along the row of his bookshelves like the naked captain of a ramshackle vellum and paper regiment on parade. 

“This time, they can do it without me,” he said. "I can't change everything. Not all at once."

"A perfect politician's answer."

The knife clattered onto a shelf; Potter's shoulders squared. "For heaven's sake, Lucius – building plans? Can't there be one thing – one thing on the face of the earth that isn't my bloody problem?"

Lucius had been a parent and a diplomat long enough to perfect the tone of mildness at its most provoking. "With what do you imagine the Minister for Magic concerns himself, if not the affairs of others?" 

“With what do you imagine I’ve spent the last ten fucking years of my life?” Potter mimicked, rattling the raven staff in its bracket until its jaws snapped in warning. “Other people’s problems. Other people’s fucking problems. I should be the world’s best politician at this rate, bring on the election!”

Allowing Potter the satisfaction of his outburst, Lucius scrutinised him. This was one of those moments he had foreseen with some disquiet. Potter would need these mornings of free flight, where he was visibly his own master, and Lucius would have to allow him them. The true test was in whether he would come back to Lucius's wrist once his journey was done. 

"They can sort out their own mess for once." Potter slipped the staff free. No sooner had he raised it than its iron raven-head crown came to life. Potter's phoenix, far away in its cage, sang a shrill note – fear among its harmonics, as if the bird could sense on the object the fingerprints of all its past owners, dark wizards from Gilles de Rais to Grindelwald who had betrayed and killed to hold in their hands Morgana's last masterpiece. The razor-edged beak swooped back towards his face, straining the wooden shaft into a reluctant curve as it reached for his left eye, all those cutting lines glinting in the light. On the third lunge, it clipped his upper arm and, as the blood welled up in the gash, Potter was already shoving the furious staff back into the brackets on the wall. With a metallic shriek, it quietened and stilled. 

Potter’s breathing calmed. He held his free hand out for his summoned wand and closed up the wound with a few mumbled words. "I’m tired of this, Lucius. I care. All right – I care. But I can’t care about every bloody thing."

With faintly stirring desire, Lucius watched the downward angle of his neck, watched all the muscles and tendons bend towards resignation, opening a window for the return of Lucius’s will. 

“You are quite mistaken,” Lucius told him evenly. “I have advised you to make yourself a driving voice in an increasingly influential movement for political change. I don’t believe I have at any point prevailed upon you to care.”

Potter perched on the arm of the couch, casually, as if his continuing nudity were yet another form of rebellion.

"And you want me to get these people eating out of my hand, do you? That's all you want me to do – and then you'll be happy?"

The weight that Potter placed on Lucius’s good opinion was gratifying. What irked was his lack of guile. Dependence on another person was the worst sort of vulnerability: it merely opened up another front on which enemies might mount an attack. It should be conquered or, if invincible, hidden at all costs. Today's snappishness was a woefully inadequate disguise for his underlying awe of the task before him. 

“Go to the meeting,” Lucius said, wearying of the discussion as he always did when it appeared that Potter might fall short of the high mark Lucius meant for him to achieve. “Encourage them. Stir up their optimism. Lend them the inspiration of your presence. You will find me quite satisfied with that.”

**

It was with a different demeanour, four nights later, that Lucius found himself keeping an uncomfortable vigil. 

Abandoning his writing desk, he allowed himself the luxury of drawing back the curtains at his bedroom window, lights extinguished to sharpen the view. The grounds were steeped in shadow, tree branches hanging heavy and still. There was no light to mark the crypt, but then Potter had passed through it enough times to find it in the dark now. When he came. 

The meeting itself posed no more danger than a few slanderous words, at most a table thumped in the heat of temper. Though he did not doubt that Rookwood and McNair were acute enough to have the group in their sights, he had gleaned no hint that they had infiltrated it already. The loose coalition that had gathered in opposition to Fudge's campaign of rapid construction work was devoted to non-violent means of protest. Its leaders were pillars of the community, non-partisan commercial stalwarts with no political axe to grind and no baser motive than heartfelt philanthropy. 

And that was the source of Lucius’s fear, that drew his eye again and again to the timepiece on the dresser as it treacherously displayed an even later hour. Drawing a blanket from his bed around his shoulders, Lucius opened the window and let the obstinate stillness of the garden into his room. The chilly air was calming on his warm face. 

It was a delicate errand on which he had sent his young protégé. There were few wizarding families who had not been affected by Fudge’s highly visible and highly controversial construction programme. Quite by accident, Magicians Against Building had put its well-meaning finger right over the very pulse of public discontent. Put simply, the Minister would either have to abandon the central plank of his policy platform, or silence them, and Lucius had guessed for some time the cast of the Minister’s mind. Into this he had sent Potter, unforewarned. 

Finally, from a stirring of shadow at the orchard’s border emerged Potter’s distinctive forward-bent gait. As he paused by the crypt, the faint starlit reflection off his glasses tracked how he sought out the lit windows and, finding none, turned straight to the bedroom where Lucius stood. When he had disappeared into the tunnel that obscured his entrance from any Ministry observation, Lucius closed the window and made his way down to the library. 

Potter was helping himself to the brandy decanter, pouring a single generous glass. Lucius watched him from the doorway as he took a first reckless gulp, then a smaller sip. 

"Okay," he said without turning. "You want me to use these people for something, then you can tell me your plan first."

Potter had never been adept at concealing his stronger emotions; it took one glance at the cast of his face to measure his anger. "Go on. What do you want them for? Why is it so important for them to think I'm with them?"

Unsurprised to see Potter drift away from the armoire at his approach, Lucius took his time fixing himself a more moderate glass. 

"Do I take it that you find the alliance uncomfortable?"

"It's the lies, Lucius. It's the lies I find uncomfortable."

Impossible to be sure how much of the anger was directed at his past, how much at the present, and how much was personal to Lucius. 

"Such a lazy habit, dividing the world into truth and falsehood. With a little effort, you might see further. An easy question, 'Is it true?'. Any simpleton can ask himself that. The pertinent question – and the only one that matters – is whether a thing is useful. The future leader of a nation of spellcasters would do well to learn the distinction."

The low light took the colour out of Potter's eyes, left them black and penetrating. "What are you planning? Are you going to help these people or destroy them?"

The very question. The boy did have an instinct for reaching the heart of a matter, even if the protégé Lucius truly wanted would have known the answer without asking.

"They are set upon their course already, and you will do nothing to turn them from it. You have courage enough in your way – heroism is another appealingly simple concept. But do you have the greater strength to watch others make the sacrifices they have chosen for themselves, to watch and to do nothing? We shall see. Now show me what happened."

Potter's attention flicked to the Pensieve on the table between the couches. "There's no need for that. I'll tell you."

Lucius's patience ran out. "There is every need. This election is not a contest I intend to lose, and it will not be won with your usual method of desperate gambles and powerful friends. You might defeat Fudge on personal charm and stature – certainly, if it were a matter of Fudge alone. But you forget the allies that stand behind him – Muggle money, Potter. More of it than you can imagine, and with a magical force all of its own. Unless you wish to dispense with my assistance altogether, you will allow me to give it to you, even when it is not to your liking." 

As Potter turned that statement over, Lucius willed him to remember how all his life he had been told simplistic lies about the struggle in which he had been embroiled, while behind his back his elders practised a far more equivocal sort of politics. What Lucius could offer him that no-one else had was unflinching honesty, if not a prize so fanciful as truth.

“All right,” Potter said eventually, his wand drawing out a silvery thread of memory that made his lenses glitter. “For now.”

His fingertips settled over the top of Lucius’s on the rim of the Pensieve and together they sank under.

Magicians Against Building had located its latest meeting in the Sorcerer’s Beard, presumably because it was a rundown little shack of no political or social importance and as close as could be found in the small magical community to inconspicuous. The larger than expected crowd clogged the doorway and covered every free inch of chair, floor or table space in the back room. Yet even in the crush, few of the thirty or so faces failed to watch Potter as he squeezed his way over to the corner overhung by the window curtain. Lucius inventoried the crowd, searching behind the occasional hood or glamour charm for controversial public figures. Margot Harrington-Blotts was there, undisguised, peering severely over the top of her small rectangular glasses. Even if Lucius had not already guessed it, the deference of the nearby figures marked her out as leader. The tall man hunched under his hood just outside the door was likely to be Tom Llewellyn from the Leaky Cauldron, who had too much Ministry business to take sides openly. A good handful of Diagon Alley traders, three or four of the refugees from Hogsmeade, the smattering of habitual objectors of the Lovegood mould, Augusta Longbottom and her grandson, and the rest were fine, upstanding members of the community whose tolerance for rapid change had simply been pushed too far. 

"Thank you, friends, for your time," Harrington-Blotts began as the noise in the room dwindled. "Thank you for your commitment in the past, and for the commitment we will need to succeed. The last week has confirmed what we guessed – the Minister is determined to see Avalon Towers completed at any cost. He has brushed off our protests in the past, in the false belief that we will lose interest. He will not give way easily. But he will give way."

"Hear hear!" said Monty Cartwright, patron of the Diagon Broom Emporium, eyes glinting dangerously under his bushy brows. "And it has to be soon. It might be too late to save the Cleansweep factory, but we can make sure the new building never goes up. We've got two weeks to do it, before they start ripping up the alley to lay their – their wretched–"

"Electrical cables and water pipes," finished a younger woman. 

"In a magical neighbourhood! Muggle fancies. And all a damned bloody nuisance and no purpose to it – what do wizards need with electricity when they've got perfectly good magic to manage their affairs?"

Harrington-Blotts resumed, "Indeed, Monty. It's a question many of us have asked. The Minister calls it embracing the modern age."

"Ha!" a man's voice rose above the chorus of scoffing, Mervyn Pennicuik who had lost Scrivenshaft's to an electronics chain which could maintain the skyrocketing rent. "More like selling out to Muggles. That's what he means to do, everyone knows it. When those buildings go up, what sort of wizard would want to live in them? No. It'll be Muggles in them, nothing but bloody Muggles sitting on top of the alley and spying on all our business."

"Listen here, we'll have no Muggle-hating – heavens above, we saw enough of that under–"

Harrington-Blotts silenced the man by the window with a gently raised hand. "Thank you, Xenophilius. We are agreed that this group isn't here to revisit old grievances. But at the same time, it's well known that the completed apartments will be expensive – too expensive for all but a very few wizarding households to afford. Unless the Minister places restrictions on the heritage of purchasers – which as we are wearily aware is contrary to his zeal for untrammelled commercial trade – the Towers will almost certainly be inhabited largely by Muggles."

A voice from the shadowed corridor called out "Then why don't we burn Fudge's Folly back into the ground."

Among the latecomers bottlenecked in the corridor was a sight to warm Lucius's heart. Young men. Strength and vigour and ignorance. The fodder of revolutions down the ages. These ones seemed about Potter's age – Lucius would find out their names later – some of them younger. The one who had spoken stood his ground under Harrington-Blotts's severe gaze. 

"Because that's Voldemort's way, not ours." It was the Longbottom boy who had answered. "What's it going to do to people if they see secret attacks in the city? Panic, that's what. They're all right on the surface – we're all getting on with our lives – but underneath it's not so good. Some of them will fall to pieces if they think it's all starting again, and we can't do that to them. No matter what, we can't do that."

The young man stood up straighter. "I don't see what the problem is. If you believe in something, you fight for it."

"Zacharias, isn't it?" Harrington-Blotts did not wait for confirmation. "Your attendance at these meetings has been irregular – understandable, of course, in a young man with an apprentice's commitments. You were not, perhaps, present three weeks ago when we agreed upon our course. Our methods will be non-violent. Your contribution is welcome, Zacharias, but not in that direction."

The hushed conversations that had sprung up appeared to approve of her answer, and Longbottom's. Zacharias, on the other hand, had turned his sneer to his companions. Keeping his ear on the official discussion, Lucius moved toward the corridor. Zacharias was continuing his diatribe for the benefit of his companions, who lounged beneath the hallway lamps in the usual assortment of robes and sneakers, slogan t-shirts and arcane symbolic jewellery.

"- a good laugh, won't it. All these timid little wizards coming in from their villages to shake their fists at him. And those idiots think he's listening!"

"Only listens to one thing, our Fudge." The blocky young man at Zacharias's side pronounced the Minister's name like a synonym for excrement. "The jingle of Galleons. Jumps when his bankers tell him too. Won't scratch his arse unless they tell him which finger to use. I reckon he'd suck their Prime Minister's cock if there was twenty Sickles in it."

"You twat," Zacharias jeered, stepping back from the doorway. "He'd do it for ten – and swallow with a smile on his face. Come on. Let's leave the old ladies to their precious committee. The Wicked Witch will still have a table free and if there's one thing Muggles do better it's a first-class rack. Even Cormac won't say no to that – will you?"

In the bar room, every word of the continuing conversation confirmed Lucius's anticipation. Plans were discussed, dates were set, and its chairwoman kept the meeting on this practical track until Cartwright's curiosity got the better of him.

"Pardon me for asking. What does Harry Potter think?"

Every head turned to where Potter had previously remained politely unacknowledged. 

The Longbottom boy said, "Listen, this is Harry's first meeting-"

But Potter drew himself up from the window sill and answered clearly, "I think it's criminal." Delighted silence answered him. "Hogwarts still can't repair the Owlery and the Astronomy Tower because the Ministry says they can't afford it. But we're supposed to believe they've found some spare money to build flats that nobody needs, right over the spot where the first Cleansweep was made. Where's the money coming from, that's what I want to know."

That outburst was the first thing for which Lucius upbraided him once the memory had played itself out. 

"Your words should be chosen with a little more care. Assume that all of them are destined to greet you from the front page of the next morning's Prophet."

Potter settled back on the couch. "What makes you think I didn't?"

"That would be even less forgivable." 

"Are you going to write me a script from now on?"

"Don't be absurd."

"Then you'll have to take your chances with what comes out of my mouth, won't you." Potter replaced his glass on the armoire, but not with a slam of defiance. His grip was tight with what looked like excitement, a nerve-deep eagerness that Potter himself perhaps hadn't yet put a name to. Lucius hoped it was the reawakening of Potter's peculiarly contagious brand of passion. "You would have said exactly the same thing yourself. Just in longer words. Come on. Something like this, you can't expect me to sit in the meetings and bite my tongue."

"I don't." At Lucius's silent command, the torches rose to eliminate a few lingering shadows. "All I ask for is moderation of your language. When your candidacy is announced, you will play the moderate to Fudge's radical. You are twenty years too young to be Minister. Only by speaking with an old man's caution will you convince the nation to forget it."

Potter thought about that; he bit back the smart answers this time and weighed it carefully. Standing in the doorway in his vintage black robes, with the Empire writing desk at his elbow and the giant ebony bookshelf rising up on his other side, his cheeks a little hollow from cold and hard work, he had slipped into one of those sudden moments of stillness that seemed to erase his youth. 

"Buildings aren't a big deal. There's a dozen issues we could fight him on. Why this one?" 

He was not asking idly. He was asking for the last push of encouragement to commit himself to a struggle which his heart had already embraced. 

"It is the right cause for troubled times. Personal. Embodied in physical symbols. And above all, simple. The Muggle question has brought too much complexity to a community unaccustomed to change."

Potter accepted that in silence. "And it's unexpected, isn't it," he said. "Fudge's talk is all about law enforcement and hybrid technologies. He won't be bothered with a little cause like this."

Lucius inclined his head, no more. If Potter could be fooled into surrendering himself to absolute trust, Lucius would have no choice but to discard him. It was necessary that he develop the acumen to recognise Lucius's half-truths for what they were. In place of faith, what Potter needed but did not yet possess was confidence: the perspicacity to choose his own truths against which to measure the ones that Lucius gave him, and the strength to choose his path without reference to such chimaerical landmarks as truth. Sentimental faith had always made Potter weak. Lucius would strip him of it, if he could, and give him something better in its place. 

"Circumspection and a slow wand-hand, Potter. If you can master these, I believe that no-one will stop you obtaining what you desire."

With that scant praise, Potter appeared satisfied. 

**

Early the next morning Lucius, who was not given to the idle pursuit of fantasy, found himself in the grip of a dream so vivid he could have described the very grain of the blue velvet lining the walls. It was the Minister's office, but not as Lucius had ever seen it. Gone were the fussy inlaid walnut furnishings and the photographs with their worn-out grins, replaced with an elegant sort of austerity. The room's sole ornament was the reliquary that graced the desk.

In strode Potter, trailing a throng of ministers, ambassadors and assorted experts behind him like a badly cut cloak. Their struggle to match his brisk pace gave them the appearance of scuttling next to the minimalist efficiency of his step. As Potter stopped at the map on the far wall, Lucius heard their chatter only as abstract concepts – "casualties" and "treaty" and "front line". He did not require the details. The story was told in the bow-shaped line of red pins running from Antwerp down to Nice, and in the hunger in Potter's eyes as he surveyed them.

It was to Lucius that he turned. His look was one that Lucius knew from the bedroom, both a challenge and an invitation.

Lucius said, "No half measures, Harry." 

He added a green pin in the vicinity of Vienna.

"No half measures," Potter repeated, wearing a dangerous smile as he added another pin in the vicinity of Istanbul.

Lucius took a firmer grip on the dream. There was nothing new about the heady power of ambition. The change was that now it came to him entangled with desire. With a snarled word, Potter scattered his advisers like seagulls and came to Lucius's arms. 

**

Lucius received his summons with wry amusement and with no surprise. Meticulously typed on sleek factory produced paper, folded lengthways by thirds in an envelope sealed with chemical gum, it evoked Emma Peck's undoubted pique at having to tie this modern miracle to the leg of an owl, since the Manor was not connected to any of the new communication channels and, as long as he lived, never would be. 

The blockade had gone up at yesterday's close of trading, just in time to see it plastered all over the morning Prophet and allowing Magicians Against Building to get in the first word before the Ministry had a chance to respond. Indeed, the front page was full of it: the picture of the chairs and planks and old cupboards magically adhered with bricks and cobblestones was simply too engaging to resist, and beside it was an inset of Margot Harrington-Blotts wielding the power of her name and reputation to full effect. Trade continued on either side of the blockade, but no traffic could pass the length of Diagon Alley without Apparating past the obstacle. In the drama of this turn of events, Potter's name was mentioned only once, mid-paragraph on the fourth page, where it could be referred to later if such credentials were called for. 

Lucius placed Emma Peck's letter in the library fire and ignored the summons. She might have reprimanded his silence sooner if not for other distractions: two of the Muggles responsible for the beating of Martin Bobbin were arrested following a tip-off from a conscience-stricken girlfriend and, when it was revealed that the Cirencester Agreement would see them tried in the Muggle courts, the outcry even knocked the Diagon barricade off the front page for two days. The images of Bobbin with his face disfigured by swelling and caked blood had graced every breakfast table in the magical nation. The conservative faction was suddenly seen and heard everywhere, and the photographs of the Muggle Advisory Office spokespersons looked increasingly sluggish. Three days later, Emma Peck's second summons, and the Auror raid that accompanied it, merited a personal response. 

**

The Atrium was a little emptier than usual and its inhabitants gravitated towards a circle of enthusiastic discussion around the coffee stand. Six years ago, Lucius might have marched through the centre of the open space, drawing every eye with his hair and robes sailing behind him as his heels struck the marble with authority. Today, he kept his pace to an inconspicuous stroll. The times were not his own, for now. 

In the face of the Minister's public disapproval, the blockade remained unmoved, clogging Diagon Alley with complete effectiveness as its changing complement of supporters patrolled on, around and within it, expressing no intention more hostile than obstinate inertia. The Ministry's initial hasty attempt to dislodge them had been fended off with well-planned and gentle wards, and now an impotent line of Aurors stood opposite the barricade, feet stamping through the cold nights but holding back from the embarrassment of another rebuff. Diggory, the only one of the four declared candidates with a credible hope of victory, had immediately voiced his qualified support for the barricaders' cause and his utmost despair at their mode of expressing it. 

However, it was not these larger struggles – the blockade or the arraignment of the Bobbin assailants – that occupied the tongues of the workers sharing their complaints over cardboard coffee cups. Their preoccupation was money. The prices on the coffee stand had risen two Sickles since Lucius's last visit, and an empty pound sign hung on the menu board, anticipating the day in four weeks' time when Muggle currency would be welcomed alongside the coins that had circulated unchanged since the Founders' day.

On his way to the Aurors' floor, Lucius detoured to the top level where, maintaining a purposeful stride through the familiar corridors, as if the building itself belonged to him, he gained the door of the Minister's office without challenge. 

The Minister's expression was the polar opposite of the distaste that had greeted his last visit. 

"Lucius!" Striding forward from the floe of paperwork that obscured his vast desk, he spoke this time not to an unwelcome petitioner but to a handsomely rewarded stooge. Trust made all the difference. "Welcome!"

The Weasley boy resumed his seat but maintained his suspicious rigidity. Four Muggles were seated around the desk, and Lucius kept them dismissively in the corner of his eye.

"Welcome." The Minister released his hand at last and lapsed into a familiar baffled silence. He looked like a man under siege. The layers of scrolls on his desktop, held open with paperweights, disclosed that past decrees were being consulted, and protruding from under them were building plans.

"A great pleasure, Minister. I won't detain you from your pressing business. I stopped by to pay my regards, no more."

"No, no, no, Lucius," the Minister resumed with the hint of supplicancy Lucius recalled so very well.

He was not, apparently, the only one to recognise it. 

"If you please, Minister," interrupted a Muggle woman with a blood red smile, "time is pressing."

"Ah yes, this dreadful business in Diagon Alley – you've heard about it, I don't doubt, Lucius."

"Minister," repeated the woman quite pointedly. "If you please." 

"I don't believe I've had the pleasure," Lucius bowed his head graciously to the interjector. "Lucius Malfoy."

She studied him silently; he made no effort to cross the gap between them to facilitate any hand-to-hand greeting. 

The Minister cleared his throat. "Rachel is with our financiers."

"On secondment from ABN Amro," added the woman who looked scarcely old enough, had she been born to magic, to make a potions apprentice or a robe fitter. She had, however, a most particular force of will, a ruthless efficiency disguised by the glossy blonde swish of her hair. It was immediately apparent to Lucius how experienced counsellors like Shacklebolt had come to find themselves evicted from the Minister's inner sanctum and exiled to the back-blocks of Games and Sport or Magical Transport.

Lucius matched her coolness. "Goodness."

"Now if you'd be so good as to excuse us, Mr Malfoy," pressed the Weasley boy rather urgently.

"One moment," came the Minister's low voice at his elbow, the flashing smile hiding the addict's surrender to temptation. The lines of his jowls quivered faintly as if under a faltering glamour charm. "You'll see the sense in it, Lucius, I know you will. If we ignore these protesters, they'll lose heart soon enough. Inevitable, don't you think?"

"Quite possibly," Lucius agreed. "Within a month at the most, undoubtedly."

The Minister's smile froze. 

"There you are, Minister," said one of the remaining Muggles, looking up for the first time from the portable computer behind which he sat. "Just as we said. They will need to be moved by force to make way for your parade."

"Yes, Julian, we're quite aware of your strong opinion on this topic."

"Not my opinion, Minister. Insurers' and reinsurers' unanimous opinion."

"Yes, yes."

Though a little older than the female, this Muggle swept his brown hair forward laddishly scruffy and wore his suit cut to emphasise a very expensive set of biceps. He was no more than mortal flesh, however, despite his air of healthy vanity. Given a secluded location and the return of his wand, Lucius might have proved it quite literally. 

"Such an open concept, _force_ ," Lucius observed. "What exactly did you have in mind?"

The female answered with professional slipperiness. "Appropriate measures, scaled according to the degree of threat."

"I will have my parade on the first, Lucius," Fudge insisted. "Not for myself, of course. For the good of Avalon Towers. The first magical high-rise can't go off like an underwater firespell. Now I don't deny there's been some debate about the Towers, and that's just it, isn't it. When they see the scale of it – when the cranes and bulldozers roll through Diagon Alley – then they'll understand the big picture. They'll understand it all right."

Fudge, it appeared, sincerely believed this. His Muggle advisers appeared the sort to value polls and forecasts over such flimsy antiquities as beliefs. They were also, he imagined, the sort with the luxurious habit of cutting down livelihoods and even lives with the slash of a pen, theory divorced from consequence. 

"Why don't you change the route?" Lucius suggested. "With a little magic, your bulldozers can avoid the blockade altogether."

"And let the protesters have a little win?" smirked Julian, leaning his chair back. 

Fudge licked his lips. "All the same, I'd just as soon not bring soldiers past the Diagon gateway, sets a poor tone, you know. At a delicate time."

Lucius did not wholly have to feign his incredulity.

"Soldiers?" he repeated, just a touch of scandal. "Oh no. Change the route. A little disagreement like this, it's no call to place your soldiers in danger." 

Tilted back in his chair, Julian sent his laugh to the ceiling.

"Thank you, Lucius," concluded the woman Rachel. "We appreciate your opinion."

Her professionally flirtatious smile was, presumably, supposed to be compensation for her intention to dismiss him utterly the moment he left the room. He returned it in kind.

A short while later, Emma Peck conveyed by a most particular absence of warmth that truancy on the part of informants was not to be tolerated. She also conveyed, despite herself, that Lucius's assistance was too badly needed for him to be punished. Flint's arrest, as expected, had yielded nothing useful.

"There are a few members of the coalition against building who bear observation," he told her once he'd extracted as much information as possible about the state of her own knowledge. "There are one or two whose families bear old links to Voldemort-"

"The Death Eaters are behind the anti-building movement then?"

The assumption was hers, but it saved him the trouble of having to plant it. "There is likely to be a connection."

His message of that evening, wrapped around the spindly leg of one of the bats from the north tower, made certain that there was. 

**

Margot Harrington-Blotts was no radical. Nor was she naive. When, on departing from one of her infrequent visits to the bookshop which bore her family's name, she perceived Lucius's hooded form in the shadows, she fell into step beside him, steering them towards the small crowd at the flickering front window of the electronics store, where they were inconspicuous but still in public view. 

"I had naturally expected our paths to cross," she said after a while, speaking lightly but low. "Although I confess I was not certain I would find it a friendly occasion."

When Lucius had begun his first year at Hogwarts, she had been Head Girl and had moved in the philosophical circles which he would later join. But no bibliophile could resist the quantity and breadth of Muggle publishing, and her family's trade had brought her into contact with the more learned and broad-minded minority in the Muggle world. In her late thirties she had married a Muggle and divorced him childless. Since then, she had maintained a low-profile position in both Muggle and magical commerce, until Cornelius's reforms had merged the two worlds and, in the wave of book sales fed by the new thirst for cross-cultural understanding, made her an ambassador and a public figure. 

"Then consider this a token of friendship." Half sleight-of-hand and half magic, he manoeuvred the two coin purses into her pocket. "I would like to do more."

Her hand did not descend to investigate their size or value.

"Thank you. No avenue of support is unwelcome in these difficult times."

She would not enquire about the reasons behind his actions, not until she had made an attempt at deducing them. 

"I had heard," she went on, "that your vaults were locked under the Ministry's orders, your funds placed out of reach. They made, so the papers say, an extensive search of your home. "

He caught the wry undertone. "One gathers loose change."

"Some do."

The six large television screens showed, as far as the eye could follow the rapid blink of images, Muggles in police uniforms emptying their weapons into the retreating back of a reptilian biped which brought to mind that unforgivable Muggle word, _monster_. Fear on their faces, and hate.

"You won't join us on the barricade, I suppose." For the first time, she had turned to face him directly.

"No," Lucius replied. "I prefer to see you succeed."

Thus reassured, she made no attempt to detain him as he slipped away.

**

Lucius was travelled by foot these days, not only because his parole conditions reduced him to it, but also because it was a particularly efficient method of gathering information. 

Caster Way wound back from its intersection with Diagon Alley towards Caledonian Road, ducking around behind the derelict back-blocks and abandoned railway sidetracks until its far end petered out in a cul-de-sac behind a smog-rimed row of Victorian office buildings. Emerging from the old Floo point in the abandoned building that had once housed Owen's Brewing Supplies, Lucius passed the busy chimneys and sooty front windows of cauldron and candlestick makers. The signs of productivity did not deceive him. The artisanal quarter was half of what it had been, now that Nimbus had lost most of its operations to head office in Milton Keynes and Cleansweep had moved production to Romania. A group of Muggle tourists were bent fruitlessly over a map, undoubtedly arrived at this backwater only by accident. The neighbourhood was otherwise empty; he kept his steps brisk. 

At the street's other end, the hole in the ground formerly occupied by the Cleansweep factory was surrounded by scaffolding, a fig-leaf to mollify the Muggle financiers who did not trust magical barriers which their eyes could not see. Five men stood on a fallen plaster sheet, peering through a break in the wall. Through it, the deep hole for the Towers' foundations was not as it should be. Over the rim of the pit crept tentacles of Devil's Snare and the far walls sprouted unlikely growths of bulbous-trunked trees.

"-two days at most," Julian the Muggle adviser was saying with his untroubled smirk still in place. 

"No more than three, if we can get enough light to put some men on night shifts," replied the thick-set, bearded man at his elbow. 

Percy Weasley clutched his notebook in a tight, unhappy grip. "They're not just trees. They're Lightning Baobabs. It will be more like two weeks before we can get them out – and that's on the optimistic assumption that we can find enough expert herbologists to do it."

The trees' leaves had the rice-papery texture of magically hastened growth. In the silence, an ambitious vine reached out to encircle one of the trunks. There was a vicious sizzle, then the slither of the vine retreating and the smell of singed vegetable. 

"This is most concerning," Meddok said to the second goblin at his side. Though he addressed Weasley, the far edge of his vision encompassed Lucius's passing figure. "Given the amounts that we, among others, have invested in this endeavour, I trust that you will take this act of sabotage firmly in hand."

Weasley hadn't removed his foreboding gaze from the baobabs. 

"One way or another," he answered distantly. 

**

Potter slept badly at the Manor – he said the portraits made him uneasy and the beds were always too hard, and maybe there was also a touch of unease at having all his dark treasures so far from view. Lucius opened his eyes to find him standing in the bedroom doorway, looking cold and a little drawn in the draughty hall and evidently waiting for Lucius to wake. One of the Malfoy owls stood on the ledge outside the window, sheltering under a gargoyle from the watery morning light. 

"Morning," Potter said as he crossed the room, unworked the familiar spells and raised the sash. The owl released its burden, a fresh copy of the Prophet, and promptly took flight for the nests in the rooftop. 

With newfound interest, Potter folded over the front page and read as Lucius propped himself up among the pillows. The morning robe Potter wore was made for an older man, too snug around the shoulders and bunched at the waist, and Lucius resolved to find an idle afternoon to improve its fit. Potter more than anyone needed to see a born leader in every mirror he passed. 

“Fudge is sending a delegation down to the barricade,” Potter announced without looking up. “He can’t give any ground here. What’s the point of negotiating? Apart from Diagon, the only other route for his parade is right through the Muggle buildings at the end of Caster Way and the Prime Minister won't want a whole office block moved for the day.” 

Lucius smoothed his palms over his face and shook the last icicles of sleep from his mind. "Then you believe, do you, that the Minister for Magic is wasting his time?"

Potter bent his head thoughtfully. "He's keeping up appearances."

"Is that all?"

"Well they're not stupid, Margot and the others. They're not going to abandon the barricade until he agrees to give up on Avalon Towers – they won't fall for his usual blustering."

"You appear quite certain of that on the basis of three brief meetings."

Potter closed the paper and folded it. "I only needed one." He reduced, finally, his cautious distance from Lucius's bed. "I can tell the difference between leaders and idiots. You should know that."

"You didn't mention," Lucius said as he took the paper and cast his eye over the topmost fold, "the guards. Stationed outside Avalon Towers around the clock, as of this morning." 

As Potter pulled the knot on his waist cord loose and let the robe fall onto the floor, Lucius kept his expression severe, schooling his face with a degree of control to which he could not seem to subject his body; his palms roused at the memory of Potter's shoulder muscles. He held the covers up to let Potter slide beneath them and stretch out among the pillows. 

"I'm not as obsessed with these bloody towers as you are."

Lucius caught the hand that was searching out the hem of his nightshirt. 

"Any further attempts at sabotage will have to get past the guards. Muggle guards. Do you follow me, Potter? You may get your Magical Assault show trial after all."

Potter's wrist ceased fighting his grip. "Not like that. That won't go down well – some bloke attacked in the middle of doing his job. What I'm talking about is a street brawl. A stupid, drunk Muggle getting what he asked for – Martin Bobbin fighting back. That's the only way to isolate Fudge and get the Wizengamot on side. That's how we win this, Lucius."

His instincts, as usual, were acute, but without the all the facts to guide them, they fell astray.

"We shall see," he said as he directed Potter's hand to its original target and drew off his nightshirt. 

Potter showed, as he always showed, no hesitation in the moment they moved from the domain of Lucius's proficiency into his own. He cast off his glasses and darted forward, his grasp rough and his teeth sinking gently into Lucius's pectoral. The vigour of him, his physical strength, was irresistible to Lucius: youth and power applied to the service of Lucius's pleasure and Lucius's will. Potter's head shook itself free from the grip in his hair and his gaze shot up.

"Surveillance," he said through spit-wet lips. "That's what Fudge gets out of the meeting. A chance to find out more about the barricade – how it's put together, how many people are in it. How to take it down."

"Altogether too clever," Lucius replied as he rolled Potter beneath him. He opened his mouth over Potter’s jugular and sucked gently. “Now do be quiet for a moment.”

Potter’s legs parted to draw him down between them. This was for Potter’s benefit. The occasional relaxation of Lucius’s physical and verbal defences encouraged a depth of trust that would be vital for what lay ahead. In a relationship that was not and never could be landmarked by soft words and declarations, an easy morning tumble like this was an obscure sort of promise. 

And after all, he could hardly be expected to turn down the tender pleasures of Potter’s flesh, not when all too few such innocent mornings remained to them.

**

"I don't mind gossip but I won't encourage lies. So I'm making this statement to stop the rumours before they start."

In the end, he read from notes in which Lucius had made no attempt to interfere, and he read with the sort of awkwardness that rang with unintentional sincerity. When he chose to, he could still wear his heart on his sleeve – even experiencing it second-hand through the Pensieve, Lucius felt it move him. That sort of transparency drew believers. Demagogues down the ages had built their careers on it, and Potter wielded it as casually as all his extraordinary magic. Lucius's protégé adjusted his glasses. 

"I've been in the papers more than I'd like over the last couple of years. People think I'm angry and reckless. You want to know why? I've lost sight of what I used to love about Quidditch. That's why. It's time for me to move on."

The announcement was, as planned, low-key. At eleven a.m. on a busy news day in London, the audience in the Candlemaker's Arms was modest, comprised of the editor of British Broomstick Enthusiast, a cadet from the Prophet, a handful of junior reporters from the likes of the Quibbler and Quidditch Weekly, and, despite Lucius's best efforts, two women from the Muggle papers plus a few curious Portree locals down the back. Still, it should be enough to make the story prominent in the sport pages without spilling over into the political. 

"It's more than ten years since the first time I picked up a broomstick and caught my first Snitch. I don't need to tell you how it felt, flying, to a kid who grew up in the Muggle world. I guess I've had a lot of moments that changed my life, but that's one of the ones I'll still be talking about when I'm a hundred. But would it feel the same to a kid who picks up their first broomstick today? It's not the same game. Height restrictions – no flying above a hundred yards. The Snitch is slower – yes, I know officially there's been no change but trust me, every Seeker knows it. And Wronski would be turning in his grave to hear about the automatic braking charms. No, it's pretty much a different game, and it's not my game anymore. Magic is meant to be dangerous. If you take away the danger, all you have left is tricks.

"So with all the warmest wishes to my team-mates at the Pride and all the fantastic staff, I have to say goodbye."

A murmur of efficient interest passed among the small crowd as it recognised the unexpected gift of a simple, catchy story on a slow sporting midweek– and one that came complete with its own photograph of the famous Harry Potter with his uniform pressed and folded on the table beside him ready to hand back.

"Any questions?"

The moment he laid down his script, his awkwardness vanished. Hesitant questions quickly turned conversational once it became apparent that Potter's fabled loathing of journalists was not about to be demonstrated. Potter was doing well, politely vague on the uncomfortable questions and charmingly self-deprecating on the obvious ones about his future employment ("Not sure. You don't need your garden de-gnomed, do you?") and his likely replacement ("The next generation of McCormacks is in Hogwarts now – I'd say a thirteen year old with good genes could do my job."). Then came the ambush.

"What's your connection with Lucius Malfoy?"

Potter's momentary freeze conveyed that he, like Lucius, had failed to observe the cloaked figure at the very back of the room. Once the attention was drawn, his stance was instantly familiar; it was only that the tinted glasses disguised his pale bird eyes.

"Auror Dawlish," Potter said, salvaging the friendly mood. "Doesn't your office keep its paroled Death Eaters under surveillance? It's pretty sad if you're coming to a retired Seeker for help with your investigations."

That and the charming smile that went with it were enough to deflect the rest of his audience from the subject. After all, there was no longer anything about the name of Malfoy to excite much in the way of curiosity.

"It's unofficial," Potter said once the memory was played out. "They haven't sacked Dawlish exactly, but they've made it clear they don't want him working with his health the way it is."

This, at least, revived Potter's interest after what had been a slow, sulky afternoon through which Potter had pretended with waning spirit that the abandonment of the closest thing he had possessed to a career was a trifling matter. He had been fast approaching the limits of the self-indulgence Lucius was prepared to grant him over a sacrifice that, in the long term, would prove slight. 

"They're paying him to do nothing. They don't have much choice there since the official report says he was attacked by 'unknown assailants' – nice thing the difference a few minutes makes, isn't it? Sixty seconds later, you'd have been breaking your curfew and he'd have had you back in Azkaban. Instead, all he can do is pretend he can't remember the attack, and spend his recuperation trying to find something to get your parole revoked. I could ask Ron to keep an eye on him, but it's better not to feed the rumours." 

Although the unpromising schoolboy in Potter would never acknowledge it, strategy of any kind brought him to life. The imminence of action, the process of choice and risk and weighing the odds, instinct balanced against logic, all those things raised Potter to his best. Even now, his wand was spinning fast in his fingers as he waited to find out if his answer had been the right one.

Lucius took a spray of spearmint leaves from the drawer and let Potter's phoenix tug them free of his fingers with a gentle patience she had not possessed on his first visit. "Agreed. We shall find our own way to deal with Dawlish."

"And what's that?"

"The same method we have adopted to date. Discretion. Once your candidacy has been announced, any attacks against you may be dismissed as political point-scoring. The days before then are delicate. Scandal at this point will stick, and you will have no official status to rebut it."

It was still difficult to predict when Potter would accept these proclamations placidly, and when he would resist. This time, his equanimity caught Lucius by surprise. "So I don't need to ask if you think I should make a comment about Fudge's new law."

The bird bucked against Lucius's knuckles, prompting him for more. "What would you say if you could?"

"I'd say it's a thinly veiled attempt to curtail individual liberties. I'd say that 'undemocratic behaviour' is so vague that no sensible wizard will know when he's about to break the law. I'd say it diminishes individual security under the guise of increasing it. I'd say that our law scrolls have already got full enough under Fudge's administration without adding yet another new offence. And I'd say that if Fudge isn't capable of dealing with Magician's Against Building under the existing laws, then he's not fit for the job." 

Lucius smiled to himself and reached for another sprig of spearmint. Exactly as he would have put it himself.

**

To a weak candidate like Amos Diggory, the wizarding community was one especially large social club. His style of government would be a matter of skilfully wielding all the levers of state to make sure that nothing whatever was permitted to happen. "Controversial" and "divisive" were the saltiest epithets his brief campaign speeches had visited upon the current Minister. But, unlike Cornelius, he aspired to scruples. Lucius could think of no worse candidate, except that his dithering conservatism made a pretty counterpoint to Potter's strengths. 

The Avalon Towers barricade left Diggory torn between repugnance for trouble-making and longstanding friendships with several of the perpetrators. But the recent turn of events had almost pushed him into an opinion.

"Listen, I've known Mervyn Pennycuik since our schooldays," he was saying on the portico at the Ministry's main entrance, hair parted awry and face unpowdered in his haste to go on the record. "He's not a trouble-maker. The barricade doesn't want trouble. It only wants to be heard."

Quill and biros scrawled as the gathered reporters devoured the latest course in Avalon Towers' feast of controversy. The last few days had kept them busy – Fudge's new law scraping in by two votes, new arrivals swelling the ranks at the barricade, fruitless raids at Flourish and Blotts, illegal imports impounded at the Diagon Broom Emporium. Lucius kept his hood up and made no attempt to steer the line of questioning.

"Isn't it true that he assaulted an Auror?"

The candidate's brow spasmed. "Well what would you do if a team of strangers attacked you in the pitch darkness? They plucked him right off the barricade, middle of the night, no warning. What would any wizard do? That's right. Defend himself."

"Are you calling on the Ministry to release Mr Pennycuik?" 

Diggory swallowed, pitch rising a note. "Yes. He's no more guilty of undemocratic behaviour than I am. And he has injuries that need to be attended to, or so we've heard, he's not been allowed any visitors, as you know."

"What about the barricade? Do you think the Ministry is going to break it down before the parade next week?"

The man who would be Minister dug his hands into his robe sleeves and scoped the floor with his gaze. "I truly hope not," he said. "Magic on both sides and everybody's temper up. It can't come to any good, can it?"

On that, as on so many other subjects, Lucius begged to differ. 

**

That afternoon's call at Gringotts left him in a less optimistic frame of mind. The fact that the Chairman had once again sent his grandson, Meddok, to meet Lucius in his place was not a good sign. Since Lucius had been careful to ensure that none of his plans impacted upon Gringotts' interests more widely than they had tacitly agreed, he put it down to a play for advantage by holding Lucius at arm's length. Unparalleled collaborators though goblins were, with their strategic intelligence, their dependable pursuit of unfettered economic self-interest and political leverage, and their sole sentimental weakness of pride, this was a useful reminder of the error of regarding them as friends. 

Meddok, whom Lucius guessed knew little more than of half what his grandfather did, which itself was only the barest essential outline of what Lucius had planned, foresaw a glorious future where Muggle money was banished, and with it the trials of competition, cash machines and the jittery mechanics of inflation. His contempt for Muggles was uncomfortably familiar, but it would keep him loyal. The double-dealing would come from the grandfather, if anyone, to whom Lucius sent his politest respects 

**

In the name of discretion, Lucius received his next news from Potter on paper instead of in person. The parchment was creamy white as he spread it out on his writing desk, thumbs and middle fingers pinning the corners – creamy white and completely blank. He selected a square silver box from the second drawer and sprinkled a pinch of its powdered contents over the paper. With a quick incantation, he passed a magical flame across its surface, hissing green, and faintly the text emerged. 

_"Tom called a meeting last night for supporters who aren't at the barricade. Eight people – mostly Diagon traders who want to keep their Ministry business. Edgar Pestle turned up for the first time, we don't trust him but the Prophet's political editor has got to be useful for something, and he's got no reason to turn against us. We're going to turn down all of Fudge's offers. We'll stick it out and wait for the Ministry attack next Sunday night. There's talk about fighting back. Margot says it's a better advantage to be seen as above violence, Tom agrees, but the barricaders have been out in the street for nearly ten days and they're angry. A lot of new arrivals over the last few days, they're edgy and full of big talk. I don't like it._

_Hogwarts Board on Thursday was short. Five absences – two confirmed at the barricade, three unexplained. The Muggle faction were short too, so I put through another request to the Ministry for funding for the Owlery and the Astronomy Tower and crossed out all their points about telephones and internet facilities. The Headmistress agreed. Parkinson will make sure it gets in the papers._

_I'm going to visit the barricade tomorrow, officially. It's the right time. I won't say anything dangerous, but Margot needs someone to back her up so she can keep them calm._

_Right now, I'm imagining your hands on me."_

Lucius dipped his quill in pearly Mooncalf milk and penned his succinct reply. _"Go in the late afternoon. Take them something with more symbolic than practical value – candles make a fine statement. You have my approval."_

**

Lucius arrived a full twenty minutes early because the series of quick-change Portkeys needed to evade detection had become so complex that it left his temples pounding and his stomach rebelling, but even so, he only had a short time to gather himself before the cottage door opened. Even in the dark, the heavy, uncompromising step was distinctive.

"Rabastan."

"Lucius."

The silence between them still jangled with four years of diverged faith and a wealth of unspoken questions. The disagreement between Lucius and his former fellows – the chasm between his pragmatic recanting and their last-ditch orthodoxy – might perhaps be bridged, and they could even be made to forget the fact that he had bought his freedom by betrayal, but only if he could deliver something unequivocally useful. And these treacherous negotiations would take place under the sombre knowledge that, for all his bluffing and dissembling, for all his improvised killing weapons, Lucius had come without a wand. Dawlish's obsession may yet be the death of him.

"Uneventful journey?" Lucius asked – a somewhat unreliable code, in their Death-Eater days, for _'Are you alone?'_

Standing by the window, Lestrange's broad frame blocked the meagre moonlight. "None of your ducking and weaving, Malfoy. You're on a tight leash – don't forget it. Have you got him or haven't you?" 

In his unassailably pedigreed youth, Lucius would have been powerless to rise above that sort of provocation. Age, for all its limitations, brought more long-term horizons. "Tomorrow afternoon. Late. You will find him rash and eager for action – qualities which, I trust, you will use to your advantage."

After the even more meandering series of Portkeys back to the Manor, with his old Mark itching and cramping the muscle beneath, he was glad of the solitude of his empty house.

**

It was always better once he had Potter half undressed on his bed. When his protégé was sprawled like that, knees parted, head drifting back, when the crackling will in him was reduced to simple physical need, there was no doubting which of them was master. 

For one dreadful moment as Potter had stood in his doorway, glittering beads of rain in his black hair, his eyes unflinching, his magic whipped up and all the effortless muscles in his young limbs primed from the journey, Lucius had found himself transfixed. He'd had an inkling, then, of how a weaker man might have fallen into Potter's thrall, made that young body the summit of all his desires and devoted his last energy to the possession of Harry Potter. There was some quality in Potter that demanded obsession – the faintest hint of hard-hidden vulnerability that called to a conqueror's instincts. 

Thank heavens for sexual appetite. It was the only defence to the unchallenged tyranny of youth. Potter's desire enfeebled him, made him governable. On a night such as this, after almost a week's absence, it was a necessary crutch for Lucius's self-control.

Lucius bit the inside of Potter's thigh, crueller than he needed to be. He held himself back from meeting the needy rhythm of Potter's hips. He held himself back from bestowing his mouth where Potter clearly craved it. He used his hand, and was not gentle, and Potter made no objection.

"Tell me," Potter said a good while later, once they were both done, making a lovely show of licking his fingers clean. "Had you really had a man – more than just a bit of play – before me?"

He was sprawled like a tomcat across Lucius's bed, untouchable and sated.

"I don't care for that sort of discussion. How did you find the mood at the barricade?"

The tilt of Potter's mouth suggested he didn't need to confirm the answer. "Just about ready to explode. Margot knows there's something up though. Why else would I skip in and out? Everyone knows I'm not – Lucius?"

Something was wrong. The midnight quiet was too deep. The hum of his wards had diminished.

"Lucius, what's–"

"Get up!"

He hauled Potter up – and to his credit, by the time his feet hit the ground, he was tensed and alert with his wand flying into his hand. 

In a few swift steps, Lucius tore aside the tapestry on the far wall and flung open the passageway behind it.

"Down one flight, take the left corridor and one more flight will lead you to the kitchens. Take every precaution and don't return until I summon you."

The crash in the corridor outside was the last of the Manor's improvised defences falling. 

"No. I'll stay-" 

He dismissed the momentary appeal of fighting side by side with Potter, testing the limits of what they could accomplish with their power combined. 

"You cannot be seen here. Leave." 

With one last burst of magical will, he thrust Potter into the hidden corridor and adhered the woven family tree back in place. As the door handle turned, he was advancing towards it, vanishing the last of Potter's clothes as he fastened the tie on his robe. 

Instinct had narrowed the identity of the intruder to two possibilities, and at least he could be grateful that this was the one less likely to go as far as murder.

"I take it you have approval for an official raid," he began smoothly, halting with a few strides between them. "If so, I should like a moment to inspect the paperwork."

Two younger men entered behind Dawlish, one of them guiding him subtly by the elbow. There was no guarantee that they were Aurors. At least two further sets of footsteps sounded from the corridor.

"You'll find that our paperwork is now confidential. To be disclosed by application to the appeals committee only. Wizengamot Decree number 108 – I assume that whatever you're plotting has distracted you from keeping up with the new laws."

Lucius accepted that with his most gracious smile. "Shall we take this into the library where I can offer you gentlemen a seat?"

After all his time with Voldemort, he would not have thought that the absence of eyes could be so unsettling. It was not only the lack of expression behind the dark lenses that bothered him, but also the uncertainty as to what damage his Razorlight had done to the Auror, which in its turn would determine the magnitude of retribution he might expect. 

"I prefer to stand for this."

Dawlish drew his wand. His first strike, after all, was only a freezing charm, stilling both of Lucius's legs where he stood.

"Check him for weapons then join the others in the search. As long as he can't move, I'll take care of the interrogation." 

Keeping his attention well away from the tapestry, Lucius could still sense Potter's edgy presence just behind it. Only that thin silk hanging sheltered all of his work from destruction. As the door closed, shielding his fate from supervising eyes, Dawlish stepped closer. 

"I suppose this was inevitable," Lucius said.

Dawlish's unseeing face turned towards his voice. "I'm glad you think so." 

As Dawlish's wand raised, he willed Potter to remember everything he had said about allowing others to make their own sacrifices, and he forced his body into stillness.

 _"Nox."_ The death of the candles made the darkness absolute, placing them on equal footing. Lucius's eyes flicked uselessly in search of any point of light to pin down his sense of direction and stop the room lurching around him. "Like me to make it permanent, Malfoy? Leave you to live out your days stumbling around this pretty house, never see sunlight again?"

"We both know you won't," Lucius said quickly, before Potter could give way to any rash impulses. "With witnesses outside, you won't leave lasting damage."

Dawlish had gone chillingly quiet. "Maybe not. But you'll find I'm quite an expert in the temporary kind. _Diffindo._ "

Lucius closed his teeth around his cry. Every joint in his fingers jerked, bones dislocated from their sockets, searing like a knife shucked in each knuckle. Professional, he thought, clinging to that thought to hold back the tide of shock and faintness as he cradled his hands palm-up to nurse his useless fingers. Without his hands, a man was only half a wizard. He collapsed a little against the freezing charm, his senses reduced in blindness to the pain throbbing up his arms and the waves of panic.

"How's that?" 

Lucius forced in a slow breath. "Quite excruciating," he replied politely, through his teeth. It was crucial to preserve some composure now, so that he could give Dawlish the satisfaction of breaking it later, before too much damage was done. He repeated that strategy to himself. As long as he had a plan, he could hold himself together. Pain was merely an unfamiliar form of sensation, in theory. It was only that Voldemort's predilection for casual humiliation as a method of keeping his lieutenants in line meant that he was almost completely unacquainted with the extremes of physical pain, and he wasn't entirely sure how much of it he could bear. 

_"Constrigo."_

The spell struck his breastbone, cranking his ribs a notch tighter, and no amount of experience with magic could shield him from the extreme wrongness of the rearrangement of vital organs inside them. Lungs crushed, heart in a frantic flurry, and unwilling muscles stretched and dragged between them, he felt with some astonishment the nearness of death and how easily he could pass into it. 

The tapestry fluttered in the corner of his eye.

"Control yourself!" he wheezed with the last of his breath. The tapestry stilled. He thought he caught the hesitant brush of footsteps just as Dawlish's next spell brought him to his knees and toppled him forward until his cheekbone cracked on the floor, split flesh and stinging pain. 

"Go on, Malfoy. Anything else you'd like to say?"

Fingers grabbed his hair, wrenching his head up. Blood was dripping off his chin. The air felt like fire pouring into his raw lungs. But, mercifully, Potter had gone at last. 

**

"Lucius?" Reluctantly, he accepted the cup and saucer Cornelius offered, settling them quickly on the tabletop before his damaged fingers could fumble them. "Do you agree?"

Grey-faced and aging, the Minister wore his voluminous black robes like a shroud. He looked swamped in them, next to the crisp pastel shirts of the advisers who flanked him. 

"No, Minister. I do not."

"What's the objection this time?" In half an hour, Rachel the financier's representative had not once let them turn from this subject. Now she folded her hands expectantly, a gesture whose understatement reminded everyone of the multinational behemoth which spoke through her painted mouth. "It may require some creative thinking, but we have magic at our disposal, do we not?"

Lucius flashed a knowing glance at the Minister. "It's all well and good to say 'Build over it' when the problem in question is a patch of sandy soil. But these are Vanishing Puddles. We cannot be certain who put them there, we cannot measure their potency, we do not know the destination of the displaced matter, and since their objective appears to be sabotage we must presume they run deep into the foundations. You can undoubtedly build a twelve storey apartment block on top of them, but only if you are prepared to have the entire building sink as much as a metre at a time at unpredictable intervals for the life of the structure."

From the corner of her eye she watched Weasley's reaction – a tactic adopted by all of the Muggle advisers, except the sluggard from the Department of Communities and Local Government who did not seem to have noticed that, of the three wizards in the room, he was the least able to keep a lie off his face. 

All morning Rachel had pursued these solutions, shifting around elements in the construction timetable to accommodate this new hurdle. On a good day, it would have strained Lucius's resources to block each new avenue she opened up. As it was, he had to work around the shimmering blind spots in his vision, needle pain between each of his restored ribs, and the fact that, having disciplined himself to sink smoothly into his seat, he was not entirely confident that his legs would bear him up again. 

"Your people have levitation spells. Are you telling me it's impossible to stabilise the building?"

"It's abundantly possible. All it would take is four or five expert wizards employed permanently on site to renew and strengthen the charms." He could see her doing the calculations. Weasley's lips tightened. "In any case, you will have observed that wizards always choose to build their houses on firm ground."

"Lucius is quite right." The Minister made one of his rare, frustrated interjections. "We mustn't take the risk. The only sure course is Percy's suggestion."

Julian the reinsurer stretched his arm along the back of the neighbouring chair, cufflink gleaming in the discreet silver shape of a football. "How long will that take?"

Weasley glanced unnecessarily at his notes. "To adapt the blades of the earthmoving equipment? An hour or two. Then as long as it takes to heap the Puddles together and evacuate them. It would set the programme back by about six days."

"Two if we started tomorrow."

Lucius's idle observation brought the room to silence. 

"But the–" Cornelius faltered. Every one of them knew that, to reach Avalon Towers, the route of the earthmovers had to pass through the site currently occupied by the barricade. Every one of them knew that the current strategy of dissolving the barricade by patience and personal pressure on its leaders could not hope to succeed before Saturday. Rachel set down the cup that had paused part way to her mouth. 

At great personal cost, Lucius rose. "Merely a mathematical observation. The decision, of course, is yours. I appreciate that I am no more than a temporary consultant."

Walking with him to the door, Cornelius stepped out into the corridor. 

"Any progress on the-" he lowered his voice "- Death Eaters? We must get to them if we're going to nip these attacks in the bud."

Blood vessels pounding against the inside of his skull at the change in altitude, Lucius snapped, "No. None."

A clutching hand on his forearm drew him back. "Lucius! It may look friendly in there but they're threatening to withdraw their funding and leave me with a useless hole in the ground. The Galleon launches in ten days. The Towers are a fortnight behind schedule already and this is a very, very delicate time. I need results."

The pain in his cheekbone throbbed down into the roots of his teeth. "I should find it easier to get them for you if I had my wand back and a guarantee of free movement."

Lucius was a few gruelling steps down the corridor when the Minister's words caught up with him. 

"Consider it done."

**

Notwithstanding that Dawlish's efforts would be all the greater following his failure to find incriminating evidence at the Manor, there was no room for caution. Tonight of all nights, Potter had to be kept away from London and distracted from easy contact. 

After a brief call at Gringotts and an afternoon in the strongest medicinal bath his potions store could provide, he found an inconspicuous owl to take his message to Potter. The reply took a long while to come. 

_"All right."_ Potter had written. _"Thirteen minutes past eight."_

At exactly that time, Potter's wards came down and Lucius Apparated into his fireplace. 

It was apparent at once that Potter's demeanour had changed in the week since Lucius had last set foot here. A jug of stale milk stood on the kitchen counter. The coffee table bore a selection of used glasses, several lined with the sticky sediment of old alcohol. Potter himself slumped on one of the couches with the reliquary box open on his knees. He looked up absent-mindedly and flicked the wards back into place, taking no notice of the jerk of Lucius's wand. 

Lucius shook the soot off his cloak and draped it onto the rack. "The raid on the Manor was a failure and we are one day closer to the end of Fudge's Ministry. I see no cause to depart from optimism."

Potter said nothing, fixated on the box, his hand hovering over it. It was only the second time, so far as Lucius was aware, that his precious remnant of Merlin's legendary wand had been in the presence of an outsider. 

"Should I take this silence for disagreement?"

He got a shrug for an answer. Perching on the edge of the couch, Lucius lowered two outstretched fingers towards the wand shard lying on its base, penetrating where Potter – by reason of who knew what combination of experience, willpower and blood – could not reach. The shock when he touched it was just as vivid the second time. Pure magic sizzled from the splintered wood up his nerves, there was the same swell of visions – black water, shiny as a mirror and fringed with mist, a dark grove of oak, the echo of a woman's laugh – and then Potter's grip pulled him back once more from the brink of falling under. The thud of the box lid cleared his eyes. The authenticity of the relic could not be doubted. As he placed it on the floor and turned his full attention to Potter, his movements felt fluid and painless, the last of Dawlish's wounds healed.

He slipped his hand under the hem of Potter's shirt and stroked his palm over the ridges of his stomach. When Potter shifted in resistance, Lucius caught his wrist and moved his attentions higher, roaming up his chest and grazing first one nipple then the other. He made no effort to disguise the sexual intent of his touch, and he did not release Potter's flushing face from his scrutiny.

Potter gave a swallowed groan. 

"Are you questioning our course of action?" His hand continued its caress, drinking in the healthy contours of Potter's chest, the aroused flex of abdominal muscle, and finally Potter reached out to grip his thigh. 

"No. It's not that."

"Tell me." Though he leaned back, his palm remained under Potter's shirt, one thumb keeping his nipple at attention.

"Stop it." Lucius smoothed the fabric down. "There was a bit of a scene with Hermione today."

It had been long enough since the last mention of his former friends that Lucius had dared to hope them dispensed with; it occurred to him only now that this might have been Potter's intention. "Over what?"

"There's been a lot of things. Their engagement party, Ginny's birthday, and she's not happy that I'm supporting the barricade. Today she wanted to know why I left the Pride. She knows me, Lucius. She knows better than anyone when I'm lying, and she knew I was holding something back. She's my oldest friend."

What he wanted to hear was obvious – that the Granger girl was safe to take into their confidence. The fact that he had returned here to bolster his will with Lucius's predictable refusal gentled Lucius's response.

"If you are hoping for some sort of bland reassurance, I have none. You knew your path when you chose it. Only mediocre politicians of the Diggory mould have the luxury of friendship." Those eyes of his were extraordinary, no matter how many times they fixed on you. "Whatever I am to you, Harry, you know I am not that."

Words slipped into his mind: mentor, patron, master. He found all of them clumsy. 

Potter studied him as he spoke. "Tom called another meeting this afternoon, upstairs in the Leaky. We were four short. One arrest. Two unexplained disappearances. Pestle has run away to Spain without saying goodbye to his wife." He laid his legs flat and lost the surly hunch in his shoulders. His idle grip on Lucius's shirtfront threatened to tighten instantly and detain him. "The barricade isn't just a diversion, is it?"

Lucius observed the rapid change in Potter's bearing and reminded himself that the most dangerous course of all was to underestimate him. "No, it isn't."

"These people are going to set off a riot, aren't they?"

Sometimes he was close, so close, to being everything that Lucius hoped for. 

"It is one of the more probable outcomes."

"And when I declare my candidacy, I'll be dragging them into even more danger."

His previous surliness had vanished and in its place he wore the absolute focus that made his legend fact. And what had brought about the transformation, Lucius noted, was a threat not to himself but to the people close to him. 

"They were set upon this course before you joined them."

"They're good people, Lucius. I won't hide behind them. I'll beat Fudge my own way." His fingers tightened but his eyes were still. "Watch me."

Surrendering to an old man's impatience, Lucius kissed him. For one intriguing moment, he let Lucius have his mouth, but no more than that, holding his body aloof. Then his hands were at Lucius's collar, stripping off his robes.

It was still an uncomfortable sensation, being undressed by a pair of hands that, without the advantage of magic, were stronger than his own. But Potter's strength was all hot impatience, never coercion, and Lucius could make himself submit to that. He used a touch of spellwork to finish his bootlaces and the buttons on his robes; otherwise Potter's fingers worked swiftly to draw off undershirts and unfasten trousers and then to warm the bare skin beneath. 

Potter was kneeling naked above him by the time he could pull himself out of the current of desire. 

"Stop." Potter's tension registered the command, but he continued licking the side of Lucius's neck with precisely measured aim. Lucius dug into the pocket of his open trousers and closed his fingers around the cool metal. He pressed it against Potter's cheek. 

"What's this?" Potter reinstated his glasses with some irritation to inspect it. In his hand was a gold pendant, a fine cage of late Roman filigree containing a natural feather half the length of his little finger. Cupping it his palm, Potter held it to the light. The artefact inside the filigree curls sparkled. 

"Snidget feather," Potter murmured, smile flashing. "Luck?"

"Agility. Of body and mind." 

Lucius had kept this heirloom in hand for a moment when Potter's steadfast loyalty was most at need. Even so, as Potter bent his head to allow the chain to slip around his neck, there was still something distant in him, something unfathomable. He lowered his weight to rest his lips against Lucius's, breathing his breath, dragging out the intimacy of their slow kiss. On any other night, Lucius would have pushed him away in disdain for sentimentality that had no place between men. Tonight, he parted his lips and let the tip of Potter's tongue trace inside them. Tonight, he let Potter set the boundaries of what they might do. 

"Come to bed," Potter said much later, when he was done with the deepest corners of Lucius's mouth. Once he had allowed Lucius a good impression of how he looked standing over him wearing nothing but the Snidget feather pendant, he stepped away. And Lucius, pleased at the intersection of pragmatism and pleasure, followed.

Whether Potter wanted tenderness for its own sake, or because Lucius was so reluctant to give it, was unclear. Lucius had no more than kicked off his trousers and rested one knee on the bed when Potter's hand slipped between his legs, fondling possessively, twining the tendrils of dark blond hair around his fingers. The hangings on the bed were drawn back and torches that Lucius had never seen lit before blazed to life. The quivering light washed honey gold across Potter's shoulders and chest, sketching fleeting shadows under the curves of his biceps and under his jaw. Lucius had to remind himself again that the physical dealings between them were a means rather than an end.

He pushed Potter back and curled his hand around his hip, giving him the subtle indication of intention by which the course of their coupling was usually navigated. Potter resisted.

"Go on." He grazed Potter's chin with his teeth and tightened his grip but Potter, tonight, would not be persuaded. 

"No." It was a gentle syllable but the look that went with it was not. Potter wore the same intensity of expression that gripped him in the heat of political planning, the self-possession of a man contemplating the fight to come. There was no glaze of desire over his eyes. 

"I had plans for tonight," Potter said. "I didn't expect you."

Lucius allowed himself a non-committal smile. After a morning devoted to manipulating the Minister and his wisest advisers, he had put insufficient effort into blinding Potter's reliable instincts for double-dealing.

"Harry." Lucius had been a fiancé once; he could coax, he could seduce. He aimed for Potter's mouth as the most effective means of concluding the conversation. Potter's hand rested on his cheek, binding him into the kiss, slowing it down, deepening it to Potter's rhythm and extending it well beyond the brief clash of mouths to which Lucius was accustomed to consent. Potter's lips were pliant, his tongue caressing, and every time Lucius tried to move them back to the roughness he was used to, Potter's arms flexed around him and stilled them both. 

Lucius had made it his life's mission to master all of the subtle shifts and flows of interpersonal power. There was no field of human endeavour in which he had not learned all the hallmarks of dominance and advantage. Except this one. The sexual act was not a negotiation; it was certainly not a form of communication. It was a domain in which the balance of power was pre-established in the act of seduction, and merely played out in the act of penetration. 

Potter wanted to set new rules. And by coincidence or by design, he had chosen the night where Lucius was least able to run the risk of crossing him. Insistently, Potter wielded his superior strength to roll Lucius onto his back, and then he set to work with mouth and hands. He moved with hungry precision, his lips glued one moment to the peak of Lucius's pectoral, pulling back the next moment to leave only the tip of his tongue making a shivering light trail. If Lucius could keep himself silent, he could not completely disguise the tension of stimulated muscle across his chest, his beading nipples, his cock slickening against the wiry hair on Potter's thigh.

"Suck me," Potter whispered once he'd got Lucius to the point of sinking under. "Suck me," he repeated more fiercely before Lucius could get his breath back. "It's been nearly a month and I'm sick of having to go to someone else to get it."

Sexual jealousy was for the gullible romantic. Lucius threw off the tightness in his chest.

"Then you should learn better control over your appetites," he said, but he did it anyway, rough despite Potter's reproving grip in his hair, and more fist than mouth. The clean, slippery texture of Potter's cock went smooth and easy between his lips. The pulse of Potter's climax went warmly down his throat. 

Potter wanted to kiss him again afterwards, hungry for the taste of himself in Lucius's wet mouth. And, finally, when Potter pulled back, panting, from the kiss, his lips had the swollen slackness that spoke of dominant desire and waning self-control. Potter shifted to draw one ankle up onto Lucius's shoulder. "Now you can fuck me."

It was not hard to indulge him in this way, making slow, deep thrusts as Potter bucked under him with his fingers tangling in Lucius's hair or seeking another brush of his lips. It was not hard to watch the glitter of colour as his eyes fluttered opened and closed in their fringe of glossy lashes. In fact, it was diabolically easy. 

The night was long and strange. By the time they woke to the hammering of an urgent owl, the Diagon barricade had been completely swept away.

**

Keeping one eye on Potter responding to the gale of owls and firecalls, Lucius unfolded the discarded newspaper. The news of the barricade was largely pictorial and highly speculative given the scant hours that had passed since the Ministry's early morning attack, four days earlier than expected. Lucius turned the subsequent pages with pleasure. It was a mark of the changing popular mood that the items with mere amusement value – the transfiguration competitions and child prodigies – were relegated to the middle of the paper. The early pages were dominated by money and politics: creeping price rises, a new range of fees on vaultless Muggle bank accounts, the liquidation of Diagon Broom Emporium, the purchase of the old Fortescue's site by undisclosed Chinese investors. At one minute to midnight, the sleepy magical community was waking up. 

Potter left the fireplace with one last assurance that the campaign would not be silenced. He pulled himself up onto the kitchen bench to watch for his phoenix's return, flicking the window catch distractedly. 

"You knew about this," he said.

"I suspected."

With a few idle swishes, Potter filled the sink and guided the stack of dishes, one by one, into cleanliness. The foam on them trickled into the rack and withered. 

"I'm not going to keep standing by and watching."

He drew his knees up, perched like the bird herself, watching at the window with an eye on the sky, preparing to launch into flight. 

"No," Lucius said. "You aren't. From tomorrow morning, you will speak as a ministerial candidate."

Potter nodded where once he might have smiled. 

**

He returned before dawn the next morning – with his weeks of coming and going and now the return of his wand, Potter's wards were a trifling obstacle to him. In his pocket was a pouch of silver nettles, which he placed in a small cauldron from Potter's cupboard and steeped in the last of the moonlight. 

By the time he had explored a few more of the extraordinary volumes in the library, Potter was stirring with the first light. He noted Lucius's presence wordlessly as he made for the bathroom.

Dressed and silent, he accepted the draught Lucius passed to him, shimmering in the pearly Runespoor eggcup that had sat as a mere trophy on his shelf for countless months.

"A clear head," Lucius said, testing whether the silence still had an edge of blame in it. "And deep calm. This method gives a more subtle effect than the Sickle potions in Knockturn Alley."

For the first time, Potter glanced down at it. "Thank you."

"Margot Harrington-Blotts is to be released from custody – unsurprising, as I said, given the influential Muggle contacts derived from her family's trade."

Potter summoned another piece of toast from the fire and took a dry bite. 

"And the others?"

"No change. Longbottom is no better, no worse. The others remain in custody. Most of those who escaped from the barricade are still at large, Cartwright, Lovegood and Smith among them."

This morning, Lucius could not have wished for a better spokesman for his cause. The black costume lent perfect emphasis to Potter's face, pale skin, brushed and thoughtful dark brows, studious frames, and the only point of colour his unmatchable eyes. The weight of responsibility looked good on him. The slight gauntness of stress, nerves and concern for his friends added a decade to his face. And beneath the stiff collar of his shirt ran a thread of gold, the Snidget feather hidden. 

Lucius touched his cheek – the merest brush of his knuckles – and Potter's gaze lifted to him. For an instant, his eyes bore a light that was Lucius's alone. Then came the fierce will he would need for the day ahead. Sombre and lovely and with all the most treacherous hurdles still in front of him, he was everything Lucius had hoped, for now. 

These things, however, were inexpressible. "Very good," Lucius said a short while later as he stepped into the fireplace and vanished. 

**

Lucius was present for the announcement, in the end, because the rumour had moved swiftly and so many others were attending that his absence would have been even more conspicuous. 

Some unlikely forecasters – the Skeeter woman among them – knew the temper of the times and scented the turn of events correctly. Others who should have known better – such as Arthur Weasley who was preoccupied with his sons' misdemeanours – were caught unaware. 

The tenor of the summoned crowd's murmur, waiting on the portico outside the Ministry building, confirmed what Lucius expected. The young man emerging from the Ministry with the sealed scroll in his right hand was unrecognisable to them, scarcely related to the Harry Potter they had come to think of as a bitter young war veteran whose public drunkenness and vindictive pursuit of controversy had previously provided the gossip columns with such rich material. In their understated speculation was a cautious hope. Their words were slightly hushed, as if they might be on the cusp of something extraordinary. 

Potter held up his hand for silence. He said, "I've just submitted my nomination for Minister for Magic." 

They reacted as if he had already announced his victory. 

Throughout his prepared statement, an excited murmur continued to run. Afterwards, it took precisely two questions before the topic of Avalon Towers was raised. 

"If the magical community wants a Muggle tower overlooking our main commercial district," Potter answered, "then Avalon Towers will go ahead. But one thing you can count on. When decisions are made about whether the Towers are built, or how, or who will live in them, those decisions will be made by me and me alone. I will answer for them. And they will not be influenced by faceless financiers deciding our future from Westminster or Canary Wharf." 

Afterwards, since it was more important than ever that there be no association between Potter and any political faction, least of all the taint of Lucius's past, Lucius left him to exercise his newly acquired political finesse and did not contact him for almost a week. 

**

The Minister looked, the next time Lucius crossed paths with him, like a man under siege. 

On a literal view of it, he was. Entering the building with his hood drawn up, Lucius had passed through a noisy throng of wizards who, in contrast with the civilised courtesy of Avalon Towers' opponents, were young and impatient. Young man and women who frequented both the wizarding taverns and the Muggle nightclubs, they did not intend to remain shackled by the Magical Assault laws, at the mercy of drunk Muggles who settled disputes with their fists. Since the Bobbin case had become their cause célèbre, they had taken to the streets in response to this morning's revelation that the Ministry's sole involvement in the perpetrators' upcoming trial would be the making of a few non-binding submissions. 

The fate of Avalon Towers, meanwhile, hung by a thread. With Harry Potter openly endorsing their cause, however mildly, the opponents and saboteurs had taken heart, and many prevaricators had taken sides. When the Minister's parade had taken place, three days early and with minimal fanfare, its audience had consisted almost entirely of magical and Muggle security personnel. Meanwhile, the Ministry's Floo spent its daylight hours coughing out friends and relatives of the imprisoned protesters, bearing petitions or drawn wands or very grim expressions.

"Makes you wish for the old days," Cornelius said with a half-hearted attempt at humour. "At least You-Know-Who was clear about what he stood for. When he wanted you gone, you were in no doubt about it. Not like ... others."

His attention wandered to the dormant computer cables and neatly piled reports left when his advisers had returned to spend the afternoon in their offices. 

"Troubled times call for decisive measures, Minister. Above all else, stability is your primary calling, is it not? Whatever future the community chooses to build, it can only build on firm foundations."

The Minister looked at him like a drowning man uncertain whether he's been thrown a rope or a snake. "Thank you, Lucius." 

**

"Decisive measures," scoffed favoured Ministerial candidate Harry Potter from the Ministry's front steps the following afternoon, his voice ringing to reach the crowd of reporters and supporters. "We all know what the Minister means when he says that. More laws. The Minister's response to any crisis – more laws, more useless laws. When is he going to act? And as for building on firm foundations, it's a nice thought, isn't it, when Hogwarts is still half wrecked and even his beloved tower block is just a big pit collecting water. The first Avalon was built on the water – is he trying to make himself the Lady of the Lake?"

The next morning's front pages wrote themselves.

**

"Because I am watched," Lucius snapped. Despite his ungovernable sadism, Lestrange was no fool, and he did not press the point further. He had seen, as Lucius meant him to, the wand shaft protruding at Lucius's hip. "I have given you the means, the method, and even the hand to do it. What more do you need for action?"

Rabastan Lestrange, in his younger days, had killed an informant with the Cruciatus and taken eight days to do it – the story would have defied belief if not for the fact that, of the three others present for all or part of the event, only Bellatrix could be induced to speak of it. 

"I'm not here to do your bidding, Malfoy. None of us take orders. There was only one Dark Lord and you're not him."

Nonetheless, the task Lucius had set for him was perfectly aligned to his capabilities and he carried it out two nights later with destructive precision. 

**

The Minister's office was bound to be swarming but Lucius absented himself until well after noon, preferring to let others do the persuading for him. It did not take too long to locate the Minister free from the clutches of his coterie of advisers, in the lift returning from the Auror Office accompanied by two men in military attire. They were Muggles and unused to magic; Lucius confunded them with barely a brush of his wand tip. 

"Have your Aurors been able to identify the culprit?" 

Cornelius had a face built for scowling. "What for? It's plain as day who's behind it. He as good as said he'd do it and then what do we have but a pit full to the brim with water and all that bloody expensive equipment piled on an island in the middle. We still haven't worked out where he Portkeyed the guards to."

Lucius had not needed to see the construction site to know exactly what had become of it. 

"If I may, Minister, I should be wary of accusing an opposing candidate. Not without incontrovertible proof."

Cornelius gave his bark of a laugh. "An opposing– What, do nothing? We can't let Potter make a joke of us."

The lift stopped. The two Muggles blinked heavily as the spell lifted. 

"It is merely a question of choosing the most effective method. Now if you'll excuse me, once I've attended to your efficient Mrs Peck, I'm expected at Gringotts."

"Just a moment!" The Minister wriggled out between the closing doors, with a placatory wave at the Muggles.

Lucius drew him into the disused corridor that had formerly housed Experimental Surveillance Spells, where the fluorescent lighting had not yet penetrated and the passing traffic was nil.

The Minister screwed up his mouth as if a slug had crawled into it. The slug took shape. "Gringotts."

Lucius was the epitome of puzzled patience. "Minister?"

Cornelius drew a deep breath, held momentarily in contemplation. 

"Our friends at the bank. What are their thoughts, Lucius? You have always had their ear."

"I wasn't aware it was a rarity." He left an appropriately conflicted pause. "Nonetheless, I do see your concern. In strictest confidence, I did get wind of some nervousness about their exposure on the building project. Oh yes, I know their investment is negligible beside the Muggle institutions', but their means are also less and this is all terribly novel. While I think you can rest assured in their commitment to the towers, all these delays may have their effect in another form. There is talk of closing their new loan facility and calling in-"

"They'd never be so reckless! Half the population depends on credit now. People will be furious – and not just with them. Good heavens, we're hardly a month from the election. They need us too much to put us in that sort of pickle."

It was no great challenge to paint any Minister of Magic in a hostile light, given the impossible task of reconciling wizards' technical superiority in spellwork against the innate ancient magics of other beings. But Cornelius made it easier than most. 

"Who knows, Minister, how goblins see an election in which they have not been called upon to participate."

The Minister grew surly. "Well, there are always the Muggle lenders."

"Who provide credit in pounds and collect interest in pounds. Such a movement away from the Galleon on the eve of its entry into the market. Of course, there may be no effect on the Galleon's value. We are engaged in a pioneering endeavour, after all." 

In the dim corridor, the Minister looked unnaturally pale. He whispered, "Unthinkable!"

Cornelius's acquaintance with leadership was so old, and his approach to it in recent years so lackadaisical, that it was easy to forget the qualities it had taken to get him there in the first place. Under all that bluster, well behind the hedge of affability that kept at bay all manner of difficult matters, lay a cold-blooded mind that saw leadership as a natural right and anyone who kept him from it as an enemy. His jawline may be softening but his eyes had a menacing glint.

"He's taking the piss, Lucius. I won't stand for it."

**

Nor would he. The news had broken before Lucius saw his protégé again. Armed soldiers in Diagon Alley, and as it unfolded only uncharacteristically firm objections from Percy Weasley had prevented the inclusion of tanks as well.

Even Diggory said that the Minister should hang his head in disgrace.

Potter, searched out by an impatient reporter as he was leaving a St Mungo's board meeting, judged that this was an occasion where the electorate would not wish to see restraint. 

"Soldiers? Armed Muggles. The Minister is setting armed Muggles against wizards – against the same witches and wizards who put him in power. Why? Because he'd rather fight than listen. Soldiers, trained by Muggles, paid by Muggles. Who does Fudge represent? That's what I'm asking. Who does Fudge answer to?"

Reading the report, Lucius could picture the tone he would have said it in: absolute conviction with that stray touch of humility, a certain disbelief that his opinion should be sought at all. That might have been the end of it, only one of the Muggle reporters following the crowd chipped in: "Will this stop the sabotage, Mr Potter? Are wizards afraid of guns?"

And Potter, turning back over his shoulder, had smiled a slow smile and replied: "I don't know. Are the soldiers afraid of wands?" His eyes glittered green in the picture as he had repeated what was fast becoming his unofficial campaign slogan. "They should be afraid. Magic is dangerous."

That picture, Potter with his wild eyes and his hair blowing back to unveil the scar, and those inflammatory words, shot straight to the front page of the evening editions.

"Oh Harry," Lucius murmured to himself as he read it, and opened the window to the return of his owl.

**

Although he dreamed that he heard the shots that night, they were miles away from Wiltshire.

The Ministry was in uproar when he arrived. Muggle military men and their aides strode through the corridors, travelling in protective packs, hands never straying too far from their weapons. The Auror Office was empty, lit dramatically by the flashes of calls in their fireplaces going unanswered. Lucius went by Floo straight to St Mungo's. The soldier who had survived the incident was hanging by the slenderest thread from joining his comrades in death. The bulldozer which had shielded him from spell damage had also crushed his body, causing injuries too numerous and too grave for magic to cure, and the proposal to admit Muggle physicians had been defeated. Outside the room, a white-faced Percy Weasley was wielding his most obstinate courtesy against a furious delegation from the Prime Minister's office. 

Two rooms along the corridor, Zacharias Smith lay dying. Lucius measured the angle for a covert spell in case that prediction turned out to be unduly pessimistic. Smith's eyes lay closed and his chest rose and fell in unnatural spell-driven regularity. In any direct attack on the Avalon Towers' guards, casualties had been inevitable. The Killing Curse took six syllables to say when a bullet could be loosed quicker than a thought. 

"They've healed his skull," said one of Weasley's underlings, his quick response deferring unthinkingly to Lucius's unofficial authority. "But the damage underneath, where the bullet passed, it's not something that magic can fix. If he lives, he won't have much ... well, you can imagine." 

The covert spell would not be needed. So long as he remained unable to tell the story of how he had come to the Towers or who had instructed him, Smith could be allowed to survive. On his exit, Lucius passed a grey-haired man with his face turned to the corridor wall, motionless except for a telltale trembling about his shoulders, and he recalled, as he had not done for some time, that he too had a son. 

At the site itself, one last crane still fought on, tottering, creaking monstrously, dented by collisions and spell damage. The dark magic that animated it was Lestrange's best. Squatting among the shattered remains of its colleagues, in a bed of shorn wheels, warped metal panels and engine parts spilled like intestines, it swung its massive hook towards the knot of Aurors sheltering behind what remained of the scaffolding. The spells they threw as they retreated glanced off its warded body. The sun creeping higher into the early morning sky illuminated the night's carnage. All around and inside the pit, the earth was torn up with ruts the size of roadways; walls were gouged with the zigzag slice of trench cutter teeth; and the bottom of the pit was thick with detritus: massive rollers and cranes, bulldozers and concrete mixers, compactors, trucks and pile drivers. All that powerful technology reduced to rubble. 

It must be something about the shape of the crane – the angle and height of its steel mast, gathering in magic to feed and renew the spell – that kept it fighting on when the other animated vehicles had been destroyed. In the end, they had to topple it down into the pit, blasting the very earth from beneath it until it tumbled, groaning, to a depth from which it could not rise. Then they tended to the wounded Aurors and searched for the remaining soldiers' bodies. 

Six casualties, counting Smith among the Muggle dead. 

**

It was early evening before Potter returned to his home. Sensing the intrusion instantly, his eyes darted to where Lucius sat on the edge of his couch, and then he resumed his routine, opening the window for his phoenix and casting off his cloak and boots. As he hung a pot in the fireplace for tea, he showed no sign of awareness of the morning's extraordinary events. He did not plant his feet belligerently and demand to be told what he must already know: that it was Lucius's hand which had set in motion the destruction and death at Avalon Towers. He made his tea and he drank it in silence. He tangled a sprig of dill in the bars of the empty cage. 

Only after all of that did he acknowledge his guest. His head followed the movement as Lucius, maintaining the pointed silence and striving for control of it, went to the bed and, making a leisurely show of unlacing his boots, stretched his legs out on it. Potter deposited his teacup on a bookshelf as he approached. He slid his knees onto the covers, slow, black-clad in the fading light. One hand on the mattress, he leaned down to run his nose up the line of Lucius's jaw. Lips drawn back, he bit, a wonderfully unsentimental act, all tooth on bone.

The wand tip that prodded Lucius's temple was gentle, but not a whit less menacing for that. 

"Muggle lives are not worthless," Potter said. "And Smith may be an idiot, but neither is he. Do you understand?"

Lucius stretched, relieving the small thrill of confrontation in his spine. "Save these theatrics for a more impressionable audience, won't you."

Potter waited calmly for him to finish, then repeated, "Do you understand, Lucius?"

He waited out the silence that followed too, his wand, like his expression, unmoving. His temper was leashed; his heart and body in complete service of his mind. The familiar impatient twitch in him had vanished, and in its place was a startling determination: the composure of a man who spoke for far more than his own trifling interests and had finally come to embrace that duty. Lucius found his mouth dry. 

If Potter learned to harness this resolve and direct it at will, he could shape the future of nations. Even now, with his combative instincts roused, his potential raised the hair on Lucius’s neck. Had Dumbledore, pulling his strings those dusty decades ago, foreseen how years of adversity, neglect and mortal threats would take the capricious magic of the Potter line and turn it into something so much more dangerous, so much more desirable? Even if no shadow of Tom Riddle remained in Potter’s flesh, his intimate acquaintance with dark magic had left its imprint in the scope of his ambition. Potter understood that all boundaries were human creations and therefore dispensable. There was no rule that could not be broken. There were no limits to what he might do and, whether they articulated it or not, every person who came into his presence felt it.

Lucius wanted him. 

"Harry." He thumbed open the first two buttons at his own collar. "Ideological debates have no place in the bedroom. Put it aside for now."

Wood bit into his temple. "Do you understand?"

"Yes," Lucius snapped, the warmth freezing from his tone. "I understand. Did you imagine your opinions were unknown to me?"

The too-bright torches blared behind Potter's shoulders. His fingers took over where Lucius's had halted, jerking buttons free. "What did I imagine?" The slight turn of his head showed how the fatigue of a day scurrying between the hospital and the Ministry, trying to heal damage that was well beyond mortal powers, had etched splintery lines at the corners of his eyes. "You're right. I should have known better."

With his fist full of Lucius's robe, he tore his arm back, physical strength spliced with a flood of wilful magic, and the painstaking elvish stitching gave way. Potter cast the pieces of black wool onto the floor, along with his wand. An insistent knee shoved up between Lucius's thighs. 

"Potter." Lucius reached out, irritated, but Potter ignored the reproach, wielding his superior physical strength, ungently, pressing him back into the strewn pillows and underscoring it all with the sprinkle of magic trailing from his fingertips in a blunt reminder of the power he could, if pushed, bring to bear. The rough hand thrusting under the hem of Lucius's linen undershirt showed the cast of Potter's mind. Lucius braced himself. 

"Is this what you think mastery is?" he hissed, his knuckles clamped white around Potter's wrist, his contempt all-encompassing. _"This?"_

Half of Potter's mouth smiled. His eyes were hooded and Lucius had the unpleasant sensation of finding them, for once, unreadable.

"Fucking," he replied, easing himself up to find a new seat over Lucius's crotch. "That's what this is. Your hand on my cock, my come in your mouth. What else would it be?" 

And yet it was plain to see that not the faintest throb of arousal troubled either one of them. Potter rocked coarsely, mouth set in a grim line. "And that's all part of your game too, isn't it? You don't ever stop. Everything you look at, you're wondering how you can use it to get some advantage. Everything's just a tool for you – the guards, the barricaders, Smith too. Is it something that Voldemort did to you? Or were you just born with no soul?"

"Harry," Lucius said, simply, as if that soft name on his lips could work its own magic. As Potter continued his provocative rocking, Lucius leaned up, lips easing open, and touched the tip of his tongue to Potter's neck. He felt the swift exhale in his hair. The skin rasped under his tongue as he licked a broad vertical stroke. "Harry." A low laugh vibrated into his jaw, but nonetheless Potter was leaning forward into his mouth, seeking out sharp edges and brute force. He bit hard into the tendon, and Potter's throat shifted under his mouth, twisting so that the ridges of his windpipe and then the unmarked skin on the other side scraped over his teeth. The muscle fought him, hardened, and then slowly began to yield. 

Although Potter was still fully dressed, the heat of his desire seeped down through his clothes to make itself felt. The black wool folds that fanned out over Lucius's legs were streaked with dirt from the construction site and the skin beneath his collar was chafed from the rough robe donned in shirtless haste when news of the attack had broken. 

"Forewarning," Lucius said as his unhurried hands reached for the bottom-most of the square buttons at the front of Potter's robe. The antique fastenings, designed to be manipulated by spellwork, gave reluctantly. He worked his way up to reveal first the fitted trousers and then the bare stomach; he paused to run his forefinger up the straining seam that divided Potter's trouser legs. "Would have made you complicit in this unpleasantness."

When the last buttons were dealt with, Potter shrugged his shoulders free. The Snidget feather pendant glimmered in the hollow between his top ribs, where the skin was intimately soft, unmarred by the day's dust. 

"Your hands must remain clean," Lucius continued, balancing the gold filigree on his fingertips and falling into self-indulgence on the familiar journey down the lean lines of Potter's torso. He trained his attention not on Potter's unrelenting face but on the swell of his arousal, on the pulse in his chest and the abdominal muscles which fluttered at his touch. "Mine need not."

He grasped the upper ridge of Potter's hips and held him as the anticipation mounted in them both. In his grasp was a young man as well as a leader, and youth was fragile. Tomorrow or the day after, he might catch Potter in an unforgiving light and find the last of it gone.

"I don't care whose hands are dirty," Potter said as he slipped away to strip off his trousers. "That's just one of your pretty little games. I know about it. It looks like it's being done in my name. That's enough to make it my responsibility. It's wrong, and it ends now."

Even as he said it, he was discarding the last of Lucius's clothing over the side of the bed and climbing back on top of him, slippery tip of his undaunted erection catching Lucius's stomach. 

Once he was moving to a measured rhythm, sunk down on Lucius's cock with his head thrown back and his face closed, Lucius stroked his flexing thighs and tried to draw his gaze off the flushed skin of Potter's chest long enough to pin down his thoughts. Potter's demand was not an outright break, then. Somewhere in the day's frantic course Potter had found time to calculate the prospects of continuing his campaign alone and the cloudy arithmetic had come out, evidently, in Lucius's favour. Of course it had. There was no-one else who shared so many of Potter's unfashionable convictions; their paths had crossed as exiles in their own land. Nonetheless, relief made his hands unsteady.

His fingers traced their way inward, up over the defined ridge of groin muscle and down through the damp hair to wrap firmly around Potter's arousal. The hard, blood-pumped length pulsed in his tightening grip as Potter's pace became wilder. His chin thrust up further, body arching back, as the full breadth of both of Lucius's hands worked him. His climax, when it came, was swift and wrenching, a private exultation. 

After it, his face glistened as he leaned forward, palms spreading out over Lucius's chest, resuming his rhythm. Sweeping back his snarl of dusty hair, he fixed his eyes with their pleasure-fat black pupils on Lucius, hungry for his climax too. The desire surged up in Lucius's blood, as it always did under the full force of Potter's attention, with all that furious will turned to the service of Lucius's pleasure. Potter himself had reawoken this appetite in him, had pulled him back from a bland and lazy middle age, reacquainted him with forgotten sensations and drawn new ones out of him. 

Whatever happened, Potter would have that. The exquisite contradiction of control and submission as a strong body rippled above him, that feeling would always have Potter's imprint on it now. As he closed his eyes and let the pleasure wash through him, building and erupting, he reached out blind to grip Potter's wrists, pinioning his hands where they were, splayed over Lucius's ribs.

When he opened his eyes, drained and thrumming, Potter's bright gaze was fixed on him.

"Tomorrow you'll give me the names of the people who did this," he said, mildness of tone his only concession. "Some of your old Death Eater friends, were they? We both know Smith and McLaggen's lot couldn't have managed that sort of magic by themselves. After that, if you want to have a say in what I stand for, you'll discuss every step with me first."

Only then did he release Lucius's hips from between his thighs. He twisted onto his back, arm crossed behind his head and his gaze focused not on the ceiling but somewhere beyond it. As if the world and its problems were his already and the election a mere formality. Lucius let him bear the weight of it alone for a while.

Then he began plainly, with all his fond flourishes stripped away, as if his voice could be made as naked as his body. "Right and wrong are playthings for rhetorical argument, Harry, not principles to guide the mind of a leader." Potter turned slowly to him, engaged despite himself. "Doing what is moral is not the same as doing good, and if you haven't yet learned the distinction then only time will teach it to you. Remember that when you are Minister. You may choose to indulge in the vanity of an immaculate conscience, but is your conscience to be preserved at the expense of the people you claim to lead? You don't need the crutch of moral absolutes. You of all people, you may have the courage to dispense with them."

The depth of quiet was meditative with only the two of them in the high-ceilinged house and the phoenix dozing on her perch. Potter's attention did not stray, even as his eyes grew haggard with the conflict behind them. Lucius reached out to smooth the stiff hair from his brow.

"That's enough." Potter, taken by surprise, flinched away from the touch and fell into a frown. "I'm not going to change what I believe." 

Nonetheless, he caught Lucius's hand and drew it almost to his mouth, before an afterthought directed it down over his stomach where the first pulse of reviving arousal could put a sure end to discussion. Lucius's finger's curled and gripped in a show of compliance, and Potter's eyes fell shut.

"Neither am I," Lucius murmured, a little later, lips against Potter's temple. Typically immersed in sensation, Potter went on writhing his way to fulfilment, giving no sign of having heard.

When, warm and sated, they had drawn the covers over them and the incongruous marked skin of his forearm was resting on Potter's waist, he took up one of the evening's many unfinished threads. 

"As to the names behind the Diagon Alley attacks, I have a meeting with one of them tomorrow. Early morning, in the basement beneath the old Nimbus display room." Potter stirred slightly, his warm toes irritating the arch of Lucius's foot. "Before you make up your mind to turn them in, you might have the patience to become familiar with their views. Consider whether destruction is the best use you can put them to." 

The movement of Potter's head against his shoulder might have been a nod. 

"All right. I'll go."

Lucius tried in vain to measure the mood of the darkness. That had been too easy by far. Was Potter's perception muddled by endorphins and fatigue? Or was it a back-handed display of trust? It might even be the extremity of recklessness. Had Potter elected to go on, resigned after today to the likelihood of betrayal and simply unafraid to face it? With an older man, a man whose character was more hardened and less given to sudden bursts of evolution, he might have been more certain. But part of Potter was always elusive – the instinct, perhaps, of a child raised among enemies. 

"Tomorrow morning. Before sunrise."

In the darkness, first Potter's fingers and then his lips sought out Lucius's face and held it still to be kissed. 

**

The sudden launch of wings did not disturb Potter's deep sleep. As Lucius came back from the window, his naked chest continued to rise and fall evenly, exposed above the crumpled bedsheet. When Lucius whispered to the gold chain, it unfastened in obedience to its former master's will. 

"Harry," he murmured, lips tingling with the sharp bristle on Potter's jaw. "It's almost six. You need to prepare yourself."

In silence, Potter drank the tea that Lucius brewed for him, his gaze once again half absent. Lucius fetched him a fresh cloak and dug out his wand from last night's rumpled clothing. Outside, their words misted in the cold air and the black sky seemed to shut them in to the little walled garden. The oak leaves underfoot had got slippery and treacherous with recent rain. 

"Wish me luck," Potter said in the instant before he vanished. 

**

He heard about it later, how Potter had descended the stairs into the basement room with his wand already drawn. How he had lingered in the doorway before stepping forward. How his Lumos had flared and vanished in the thick net of leeching hexes that had already been laid down in preparation for subduing the nation's most notorious spellcaster. 

"Show your face then," he had demanded. "Or we can all take our chances in the dark." It was a stunning spell that felled him, they reported back to Lucius, clean and swift. Emma Peck described with some pride the shackles they had put him in – Muggle inventions reinforced with her own heavy-handed magic. He had gone prepared for one or two Death Eaters, not an eager room of Aurors and enforcers.

"After all the bloody grief he's given us," the Minister observed with evident bemusement the following morning, "He hardly put up a struggle. Nothing our officers couldn't deal with."

Lucius merely leaned back into the responsive velvet of the Minister's guest chairs. "It would be a mistake to underestimate him."

"Oh yes, yes. Of course. He'll be kept in isolation, as I've always said. Heavily guarded."

"Aurors?"

"I judged it best, in all the circumstances. Unless you think-"

There was a flicker of hesitation, but no more than that. "It might be wise." 

The Minister, with effort, raised his gaze from the desktop. "I had no choice, you realise. The boy left me no alternative. Elections are hardly possible under the constant threat of sabotage."

When he nudged the silver bell with his wand tip, it rang for tea. He let out a long, pensive breath.

"Now if we're done with the building opponents for good, the next step is getting the foundations back on track and soothing our financiers' ruffled feathers." 

Lucius bestowed one of his frugal smiles. "There, I believe, I will be able to assist you."

**


	4. The Sword Unsleeping

Level Five, of all the Ministry's floors, bore the least resemblance to its pre-democratic days. As the focus of the magical community had moved, cutting its wizarding ties in its burgeoning romance with the Muggle world, one by one the departments had been razed: first to go had been International Magical Trading, then International Magical Law, and then finally the International Confederation of Wizards whose six representatives had been reduced to one and then subsumed into the Wizengamot administrative branch. 

In their place lay acres and acres of the Muggle Advisory Office. Above the savannah plain of partitions and filing cupboards, only the occasional soaring memorandum marked out the office as a magical domain. Indeed, although these statistics were not advertised, only a little over half of its workforce had any magical heritage, and a further third of those were what had once been known as Squibs. Telephones, in-trays, noticeboards – the floor had all the hallmarks of Muggle hyper-efficiency that stood in for actual productivity. Blonde women in black heels leaned over the pin-striped shoulders of their colleagues, tapped square-cornered nails on computer screens and one-upped each other on bargain price hotel rooms on the Costa del Sol. 

One corner of the old Level Five, however, had been preserved. The ambassadorial suites lining the west wall retained their burgundy leather armchairs and wide mahogany tables. In the largest of these, Lucius Malfoy had not officially acquired a desk, and from that desk he did not officially meddle in the governance of the nation.

Three days had passed since the sabotage of the machinery at Avalon Towers, and two since Harry Potter had been taken into custody.

Weasley pushed the door closed behind him to shut out the noise from the offices outside, looking a little flustered from the long journey from the Minister's floor. 

"I've finished the text," he announced when Lucius made no sign of welcome. 

With a brush of his wand, Lucius furled up the scrolls he had been consulting and sent them into the chest of drawers on the far wall. He accepted the paper Weasley passed him and laid it on the polished expanse of the desk, between the quill and inkpot and the telephone that had not yet been heard to ring. While his work was being evaluated, Weasley's attention caught on the only alteration to the room that marked Lucius's presence: the huge double window behind the desk which today showed a view of mountain peaks, blue sky and drifting clouds. Lucius took up his quill.

"I thought it prudent," Weasley said, "to avoid overt controversy, given the agitation in the community."

"Did you?" Lucius obliterated two paragraphs with green ink. "Has the Minister seen this?"

"No."

"Very wise." The quill scratched noisily, adding hasty new text. 

"I've taken the liberty of committing to a timeframe," Weasley resumed. "As the Minister no doubt means to do. Certain people will be quite naturally dismayed about the disruptions to the democratic process, and only a firm commitment will satisfy them. So I've stated that the postponed elections will be resumed in-" Weasley had stepped closer, trying to make out the writing. "Indefinitely?" 

Weasley's habitually passionless features grew mobile as the quill continued its work. 

"Yes, Percy, indefinitely. These are unstable times and announcing a new election date would simply focus the opposition and discontent around a firm objective. Stability must be the primary aim. When we have that, we can once again afford the luxury of public consultation and debate."

Lucius leaned back and tapped the page once. The green ink blurred into black as the discarded words vanished. With outrage bitten hard between his lips, Weasley grasped the page and considered the new speech.

"I had quite deliberately avoided all mention of that name," he said tightly. 

"So I noted. An understandable if timorous decision. Potter's name is on the lips of the press, and the subversives, and indeed every witch and wizard in the country. Avoiding it only lends it sanctity. The Minister must not be afraid to acknowledge him."

Weasley maintained his nonplussed expression until the end of the speech.

"You can expect Ogden and his supporters to have something to say about all of this," he said as Lucius held out his hand for the return of the parchment, and refrained from noting that his own father was one of the more vocal of those supporters. "Especially the failure to name a new election date."

"I do not expect him to be listened to."

"That's absurd. He's the oldest member of the Wizengamot, three years as its chief spokesman-"

"Is he?" Lucius enquired pointedly and waited for the frown that indicated Weasley's full engagement with the question. "Or is he merely a former parliamentarian with a regrettable habit of resigning his seat whenever a decision does not go his way – a habit which, incidentally, somewhat undermines his claim to commitment to the democratic process."

Weasley was the perfect public servant and the very worst sort of politician. His face was naked: evaluation lit it up, then repugnance, then the intellectual breed of adrenalin stirred up by an ambitious theory. "He doesn't speak for the Wizengamot anymore, does he? As long as he keeps up his protest, Mr Ogden of Little Norton is just an ordinary private citizen."

An extremely clever young man with a loathing for inexactitude, Weasley was easy to manage. A constant diet of novelty kept him sufficiently drowned in detail to apply too much of his intellect to the broader strategies being played out. 

"Very good," Lucius murmured with the hard-won approval that on one or two occasions over the last two days had brought Weasley to the point of evident discomfort. "Now if you would be so good as to run the Minister through the text a few times. Would you mind double-checking the references to the last election? The percentage I've cited is certainly true for England, but the statistics for wider Britain may not trend the same way."

When he had gone, Lucius resumed his letter to the Enforcement Section of the Financial Services Authority and tossed it into the mail tray. That brought him to the surveillance report he had pocketed direct from the Minister's desk, that told him that, despite the conditions of her house arrest, Margot Harrington-Blotts had received a number of communications from business contacts on the continent offering to aid her exit from Britain. 

Far more pressing was the question of the Galleon. Cancelling its proposed entry into the foreign exchange market, even with the launch a mere three days away, was simply a matter of will – but unfortunately this was the very quality of which Cornelius had least, unless his back was firmly up against the wall. Once upon a time, this had been an advantage, since Lucius's will had for many years been sufficient for them both. But times had changed. In a world without magic, a talented Muggle could work his way to power only by becoming a master of the art of professional persuasion. The slick Prime Minister could sway Cornelius with little more than a smile and a firm handshake. There was no choice but to keep the Minister distracted until the deed was done. 

**

From his conflicted expression, it appeared that the guard was not often in the position of seeing one of Azkaban's residents return through the official entrance with the trappings of superior authority. Lucius, who was suppressing a similar tremor of hesitation upon finding himself back at the scene of four years' humiliation, went on the offensive.

"Since the Ministry has not yet reversed its policy on staffing this facility with wizards, I can only assume that incompetence is to blame for the state of security. Where is the second guard? Why is the portcullis up? I could have had you in four pieces by now." 

The guard's face darkened. "We don't get much in the way of visitors. And a lot of the inmates have moved on." So he had indeed been one of the unseen faces during Lucius's incarceration, and remembered it. 

"Few enough distractions, then, from your duties. If the security charms are re-laid before my return, I may be persuaded not to raise the matter with the Minister. Where is Potter's cell?"

"Not so fast, Malfoy. There's a procedure for–"

Lucius launched towards the middle of the three corridors that branched off from the entrance hall. "The security procedure does not apply to Potter. The interrogation team requires the full spectrum of techniques and your scans and searches cannot be permitted to impede them."

The guard called after him, "And since when are you part of the interrogation team?"

Lucius graced him with no more than a glance over his shoulder.

"I speak," he said with terrible courtesy, "with the authority of the Minister for Magic, who is also your employer. For the time being. If you wish to have time to get down on your hands and knees to charm those flagstones before I return, I suggest you lead me to the cell immediately."

Reading reports of the makeshift interrogation cell had not quite prepared him for the reality. Daylight became a distant memory as they descended the stairs, going deep into the island's dead heart, threading between damp walls that sucked in heat, senses oppressed by the weight of all those tons of fortification hulking far above. The frugal torches along the subterranean corridors made for a disquieting journey through bursts of light and long stretches of gloom. The familiar gut-deep distress grew stronger as they drew nearer, and outside the cell Lucius had to touch the wand at his side for fortitude as they passed the four silently hovering Dementors.

"Here-"

"That will be all." 

Increasing his pace, he threw open the door, already speaking. "Good afternoon, Mrs Peck. I apologise for the disturbance."

Four faces turned to him which meant, fortunately, that only Lucius observed Potter's reaction. A jerk of his head spoke of unsuppressed hope before the emotion could be disguised. 

"Mr Malfoy," said Emma Peck and he turned his full attention to her. 

"Please don't let me interrupt. The Minister wishes to reassure himself about the state of the prisoner's captivity. I have no desire to change the course of your interrogation. Only to observe."

She approached him, skirting the puddle in the centre of the room. A recording machine clicked as a wide-shouldered man in the city attire of Muggle Advisory deactivated it. The room's final occupant motioned to a hovering quill which detached itself from the page and lay dormant.

"What is the Minister's concern, exactly?" she asked, her lowered voice ripe with suggestion that any concern ought surely to have been communicated direct from the Minister's lips to her ear. 

Her French twist had been abandoned in favour of a functional ponytail and her face was all business, not a trace of artificial beautification on it. Courtesy appeared to require some effort at present. Her subject was no doubt proving to be exactly as accommodating as Lucius had anticipated. "Questions have been asked about Mr Potter's treatment. The Minister must be seen to take an interest. That is all."

The wad of pages in her fist creaked faintly. "You can assure the Minister that we are treating Mr Potter precisely according to the law. The Wizengamot has made it clear we may do no more, no matter how obstructive the subject. You can inform the Minister that Potter remains the only prisoner who might be considered a ringleader – except for the untouchable Mrs Harrington-Blotts – and he is being extremely uncooperative."

"Despite your most diligent persuasion."

Emma Peck measured the silence with a long, humourless look. "He has enough runespoor essence in his system to render Veritaserum useless – a signature Death Eater technique, I am informed – and up until this morning he had not deigned to answer a single question. The methods at my disposal are inadequate. You may expect slow progress until they are increased. Please feel free to take a seat." 

With that crisp dismissal she returned to her interrogation, punctuated by the resumed click of the recording machine, and Lucius finally had a chance to observe his subject. 

Potter looked as bad as Lucius had seen him over their convoluted history, perhaps a little worse. He was unwashed and haggard and, with every second of Lucius's presence, mountingly hostile. Under the greasy snarl of his hair scowled a face slightly sallow with sunlight deprivation. His eyes, on the rare occasions when they flicked in his direction, said that Lucius was a dead man, and Lucius believed he might have the will to do it, too, except that Potter was shackled as if his captors believed him to be Merlin himself, who might call down thunder and lightning to his aid if he were not restrained by the most powerful magic they knew. Thick iron cuffs fastened his ankles to the legs of the chair beneath him, and his hands were tightly bound in the same manner behind. Magical dampeners dotted the dull iron – chalcedony and onyx at ankle and wrist and around the hoop at his neck. Cornelius had never been given to subtlety.

Emma Peck unfolded her papers. "Three days ago you were apprehended in the derelict former premises of the Nimbus Broom Company. A secluded site which you had no legitimate reason to visit at that hour. Who were you meeting there?"

Potter directed his cool silence at her, at each of her two accomplices, then at Lucius.

"Mr Potter, do you understand the question?"

"I understand it. But I'm not going to answer someone who's abducted me off the street and held me unlawfully. Get me in front of the Wizengamot first. Then we can talk about who's committed undemocratic behaviour." 

When he spoke, his lips showed pale and pink inside the three-day shading of bristle. Emma Peck looked as if she had heard this speech some time back and was not pleased at its return. 

"You are well aware of the procedure. You will be subject to the provisions of the law, on the same footing as any other miscreant. Your celebrity will not help you here."

Potter used the voice that brought to mind all the odds he had challenged and overcome before. "I can wait until the election. It's only four and a half weeks."

"Oh, no," said Emma Peck with malicious understatement. "It isn't."

Potter glanced at Lucius, then back at Emma Peck, finding confirmation. His threw his glare down to the floor, wrists flexing in their cuffs. 

"When is it then?"

For the first time, Lucius addressed him directly. "As of this morning, the election has been postponed indefinitely. With the forced withdrawal of two opposing candidates, there was no sense in proceeding."

"Diggory too?" Potter said, with his face open, looking instinctively to Lucius to make sense of the political jigsaw.

It was uncomfortable. "Yes. It was an open secret he'd harboured escapees from the barricade. The consequences caught up with him last night. He has fled north and forfeited his candidacy. Mrs Peck, do go on."

Her attention lingered on Lucius. She was a shrewd woman, but the reality of his dealings with Potter was far too improbable for her instincts to puzzle out. 

"Whoever you were meeting, Mr Potter, has left one of my enforcers with near fatal blood loss, and remains at large." She wisely let that reminder sink in. "Your silence makes you an accomplice to his crime, on top of all of yours. Are you sure you want to protect him?"

The conflict didn't show on Potter's face, but Lucius knew it was there. Perhaps for the first time, he would be considering that the choice between silence and confession was more than a matter of personal pride. 

"You'll make everything easier for yourself if you tell us who he was."

Fortunately she had abandoned the one line of questioning that might have pushed Potter into compliance, in favour of an appeal to self-interest that would only bring out his contempt. It was not her only error of late. Had she not been preoccupied with conveying the bound and unconscious Potter to his imprisonment, her people might have surprised Lestrange upon his arrival and cornered him – a turn of events which could only have had one outcome. 

"It's a dangerous path, conspiring with Death Eaters. Surely you don't imagine they'd risk themselves to protect you?"

"No," Potter snorted. "I don't."

"Well then."

He took his time before he spoke again. "There's nothing I can tell you."

Lucius eased his palms open on his thighs. 

Once, the outcome of Potter's polar moral judgment would have been all too predictable: Lucius's betrayal would have cast him permanently in the role of enemy, and Potter would have done everything possible to expose him. Now, he hoped that Potter's conclusions might be a little more subtle. 

Most of all, he placed his faith in his abilities as tutor. He had given Potter, he hoped, the patience to think beyond his instincts and tease out the politics at play. To understand that Lucius, by virtue of his influence, was the only dubious protection he might hope for, so far from his friends. 

Disclosing their history would earn him nothing but retribution – from Lucius, if he we were not believed, and from the Ministry if he were. One of his central tasks over the last two months had been containing the wildness in Potter. That millisecond pause that Potter left now, between provocation and response, that was Lucius's legacy. Potter would not talk for the sake of lashing out in revenge; he would fathom the advantages first. But now that he knew the lay of the land, he would be turning all of his formidable skills to the goal of escape, and Lucius had to be prepared to stop him.

"Your absence has been noted," Emma Peck was continuing, "at a number of official functions. The opening of the Scrimgeour monument is one of many invitations you've ignored."

Avoiding words which could be slanted back at him, Potter answered with a scoffing twist of his mouth.

"This absence extends into your private life as well, apparently. Where have you been, Mr Potter? Engagement parties forgotten, dinner invitations missed, birthdays –"

"A pattern of negligence-" Lucius broke in, but Potter had already heard enough.

"Who?" he demanded, suddenly fierce. Emma Peck gave him a blank look. "Who else have you been interrogating?" 

She took her time leafing through her stack of paper, as if the facts might have momentarily escaped her. "Oh, a handful of people. People with information about the anti-building movement. Or about you."

He drew himself up, extremely still and contained in his bindings, and possibly he even believed that the question left his greatest vulnerability concealed. "Who?"

This time she did not have to consult her files. "Neville Longbottom. Luna Lovegood. Ronald Weasley. George Weasley. Hermione Granger. Others. Some of them were helpful. Some were not. Longbottom and Lovegood remain in custody for further questioning."

"He can't be. That chest wound from the barricade needed treatment – he should be at St Mungo's."

"The choice is in his hands. He need only co-operate."

His face closing off, Potter did not take his eyes from her as she occupied a seat and arranged her papers and quill on her crossed knee. He did not ask any more questions about his friends. Lucius gave up his entire afternoon to make sure of it.

**

It was after six by the time he returned to the Ministry, and the Atrium was a one-way tide of homebound workers. It parted around his distinctive height and hair as he left the Floo and strode towards the lifts. 

"Mr Malfoy." An insistent hand detained him. 

"Miss Granger. Good evening. If you'll excuse me, I'm somewhat pressed for time."

She planted her feet in front of him and raised her voice a little. "Can't you spare a moment to discuss the unlawful arrest of Harry Potter?"

Passers-by slowed their steps and turned to listen. The name alone worked magic, and they both knew that she had barely strained her voice yet. With a faint smudge of ink on her jaw, a couple of tangled locks escaping from her hasty bun and shadows under her eyes, she looked as if the end of her patience was not far off.

"Certainly." 

He made for the lee of the coffee stand, where they could be seen but not noticed by the passing crowds. 

"How is he?" she asked as soon as he halted.

Granger's position in the Department of Mysteries left her without sufficient influence to affect Potter's fate directly, but with a degree of standing that enabled her to attract attention, as the petition that had reached his desk that morning indicated she was intending to do. 

"He is in custody. He is unharmed. And beyond that his status is confidential."

"For heaven's sake, I'm not asking as a concerned citizen. I'm asking as the closest thing he has to family."

"Is that so? I understand that Mr Potter's next of kin is a Muggle who has made no official complaint."

That displeased her. "Then I'm asking as the co-ordinator of the campaign to release Ministerial candidate Harry James Potter form unlawful imprisonment. Where is he, why are Muggle Advisory pulling his friends in for questioning, how long do you intend to detain him and why have his Decree 12 rights been suspended?"

Had she been born to old magic, she might never have developed this bumptious manner of over-compensation. The knowledge of her magical superiority might have given her a core of confidence that elevated her above such shrillness. 

"Miss Granger, I shall see that your petition is delivered to the Minister, in the proper course. There are official channels through which to direct your concern – and waylaying me in the foyer is not one of them."

"Azkaban?" She quite deliberately raised her voice again, and there was a natural tremor of protectiveness in it. "That's where you've come from, isn't it? Why does the Ministry want him at Azkaban – and Dementors, no less. If you've got any evidence against him, disclose it so we can answer it. Otherwise move him to the Ministry where we can see that he's safe."

Her reputation was for solid and highly competent research, not for histrionics, but it was apparent that Potter moved her, as he moved so many others, to extraordinary lengths.

Frustration, for an instant, got the better of him. "As his friend, surely you ought to know better than to presume him to be wholly innocent." 

"What was he helping you with?" This time, her low-pitched words barely carried. 

"What a delightfully absurd suggestion. Harry Potter in league with the Death Eaters."

She was studying him, watching for a clue, for a slip. "Not with the Death Eaters. With you. I was at your wife's funeral – I know the difference."

Granger called for more cautious handling in future, he noted to himself, and considered two or three ways to manage it. 

"If I may be frank, there is nothing I could say or do to turn the Minister from his present course. He is convinced that Potter is behind the attacks on Avalon Towers, and no argument that will persuade him to release his most dangerous prisoner. The stakes are simply too high." 

"What about the torture?"

"The Ministry does not condone torture. Good evening, Miss Granger."

He slipped back into the crowd before she could say more. 

**

The day's distractions were not done yet. He had scarcely reviewed the surveillance reports on Harrington-Blotts' house arrest and Diggory's supposed refuge in the Midlands and sliced open the Financial Services Authority envelope when his door swung open to admit the Minister's special adviser. Julian Starke approached with the well-bred swagger that reflected the weight of the reinsurers he represented, on whose support the feasibility of Avalon Towers and the confidence of its financiers depended. 

"Can I have a word?" he asked, all false courtesy.

As Lucius laid aside his correspondence, his visitor leaned against the doorframe – indolent in posture as he was in his entire manner, indolent with the laziness of a sharp intellect rarely stretched to full potential. Almost a decade older than Potter, he had the same want of discipline, and if he'd been born with a shred of magic in him, Lucius might have been curious to see what he could become. However, he was casting his eye over Lucius's trinketless office with his usual bemused look that said his Muggle certainties could not be challenged by something so ephemeral as magic. 

"How can I help you?"

Julian looked up sharply, amusement crinkling his eyes and then vanishing. "The Potter question. Put your cards on the table, Lucius. Where do you stand?"

Lucius said evenly, "He must be made to talk."

Allowing him a moment to expand that statement into something more helpful, Julian closed the door behind himself and slid into the visitor's chair. 

"We can all agree on that. What I want to know is what you meant by the memos you sent this morning."

"The ones I sent to the Minister?"

His brown eyes glittered again with the hint of shared humour that was a universally acceptable mode of both flirtation and attack. "Yes, the confidential ones which you're hardly surprised that I've seen. Are you against stronger methods or are you simply determined to stay out of the firing line? Perfectly understandable if you are – we can find a way around it."

He crossed ankle over knee and leaned back, inviting Lucius to be at ease. 

Lucius was not. "Stronger methods?"

He shrugged. "Physical methods. Torture. Whatever spells you've got, or the army's old favourites. Both, if that's what it takes. Why are you trying to protect him?"

"What I am protecting," Lucius said slowly, "is this administration."

"From a kid who's just a few years out of school?" 

That sort of ignorance no longer had the power to rouse Lucius to disappointment, let alone annoyance.

"The official histories have been somewhat gentle with the facts of Voldemort's coup," Lucius told him. "And with the scale of Potter's victory. They have held back on some of the less savoury facts."

No doubt a good instinct for untruth was essential in the reinsurance business, which after all was nothing more than gambling with multi-billion dollar stakes. Julian weighed this up. "I see. No sense in alarming your new non-magical friends with the worst of what wizards can do. Is that right?"

"I presume the Ministry's logic went something along those lines. For myself, I would have preferred complete candour."

Julian grinned, as if delighted by the layers of irony in that, and his grin disclosed also that he knew very well where Lucius had been at the time, and why.

"Put it in plain English for me. Do you want us to give him the cotton wool treatment because he's some sort of national hero?"

Lucius chose his words very carefully. "No. But he is not to be idly abused. If he is to be subject to stronger persuasion, it must be done under the Minister's hand and with the full weight of official authority. To leave it, as you suggested, to an unauthorised act by a rogue underling would appear not only callous but incompetent."

In his artful combination of deep thought and nonchalance, Julian laced his hands behind his head and slouched right back in his chair. 

"I'll draft an ambiguous order then. It won't say anything outright, but it'll use the sort of language that's easily misunderstood."

Lucius allowed him a few moments to enjoy his solution. "I really must introduce you to the formidable Mrs Peck. I'm afraid you will find her quite insistent upon the letter of the law." 

He snapped instantly out of his slouch, leaning forward. "Replace Mrs Peck."

"She is too well-informed."

"Get the Wizengamot to strengthen the laws."

"Too slow."

"Put him in the army's hands."

"And provoke a full-blown anti-Muggle riot?"

"It's as I said. You're protecting him. Why?"

Even if he'd had something to hide on that count, Lucius would have met his inquisitorial gaze with the same lack of concern. The discussion, however, was distracting him from more urgent errands and, notwithstanding a certain masculine grace that Lucius had only recently learned to appreciate, Julian's unceasing vanity made him an unwelcome visitor. The line of conversation was starting to sound disconcertingly pre-meditated. 

"Unless it's not about Potter at -"

With his hand on the pocket that held his wand, Lucius cast his curse – not the Imperius but its gentler cousin, a potent suggestive spell. The Muggle's inexperienced mind was swept instantly under it.

Lucius spoke slowly, "As time will tell, I have only the nation's interests at heart. Now, would it not assist the Minister's task if you were to compile a dossier of military protocols on the application of force in the interrogation process? A precedent would be useful." 

Julian blinked at him as if he'd found himself suddenly and incomprehensibly drunk. "Yes. Good idea."

He made no resistance as Lucius ventured into his faint cloud of top-of-the-market male fragrance and led him to the door. 

"Good night, Julian," he murmured, closing it.

In his top drawer was a silver pocket watch calibrated not with numerals but with destinations, ranging from the homely to the exotic. Bangor, it read. Colwyn Bay, Whitby, Margate, Broadstairs, Brighton, Bournemouth, Penzance. He spun the single hand with one finger for a long while before he took himself back to the even less appealing business of bringing his little nation back from the brink of ruin.

**

As he let himself past what repeated Ministry searches had left of Potter's wards and stepped into the garden, the phoenix gave a plaintive call. She was young to be parted from her master, too young to look after herself sensibly. She remained in this obstinate nether-world, perched on the wall and shunning both the freedom of the sky and the empty house that was fast losing the smell and the sense of its owner, and nothing Lucius could think of would tempt her either up or down.

A valuable bird, if sentimental. He found some straggling mint in the far corner and stretched up to set it on the wall. She shuffled away reproachfully as he came near. Perhaps she was wiser than he thought. 

**

He was already standing in the fireplace the next morning when Weasley came up at a jog.

"Call from Gringotts," he panted as he pulled up, catching his breath. "Urgent. The Chairman wants your ten o'clock meeting moved to eight."

The timepiece in the foyer said that left him less than five minutes for his errand.

"I trust he understands that this is far from convenient."

"He said that in the circumstances ..."

The circumstances were that yet another attack on Avalon Towers had occurred overnight – the newly laid concrete foundations turned into sand – and rumours were spreading that the Muggle financiers were on the verge of scuttling the project, all of which made it imperative that he get to Azkaban to see Potter before they began another round of interrogation on the subject of the anti-building movement. The circumstances were also that the protesting members of the Wizengamot, fired up by the likes of Ogden, Granger and Arthur Weasley, were talking of resuming their seats following the weekend for the sole purpose of repealing the undemocratic behaviour laws. The circumstances were that the Chairman was the last person Lucius had time for this morning. 

"Very well," he said, because the Chairman was also one of the few people with first-hand knowledge of his dealings with Potter, and the only person with the skill and ruthlessness to use that knowledge effectively against him.

Eight o'clock saw him seated at the glossy black table in the Gringotts boardroom, the same table he remembered from his first meetings at his father's elbow, a lifetime ago when his simplistic certainties had deemed the goblins barely superior to livestock. Despite their displeasure, they still accorded him the official seat opposite the Chairman, but their cool welcome had already made it clear that his status was under review. 

"Avalon Towers is proceeding," he began without preamble. "With the Minister's support and with full backing from its Muggle financiers. You have my word on that. How else can I assist you?"

"The Galleon," said Meddok too quickly, earning his grandfather's disapproving glance. 

"What of it? It will not be traded. The current system will be retained – exchanging magical currency will be prohibited except in a very select list of facilities, and Gringotts will continue to be the foremost of those."

The goblins turned to the Chairman expectantly. "Thank you, Lucius. That is reassuring. However, the Diagon Alley trading desk is very slow at present. The Minister has set the official exchange rate far too high for our customers' tastes, and we can only presume we have lost them to the black market."

They were all new to the language of economics. The bank's core concern of physical security was now only a minor component of its business, and Lucius had known already that its governors were worn out with novelty. He turned his tongue to the new jargon. 

"The official rate is high, certainly, but only due to the artificial dip in real value contributed to by political and economic uncertainty. Now that the election is disposed of, the only vulnerability is Avalon Towers, and once that is stabilised, the Galleon's value will fall in line with the official rate. In the meantime, I can assure you that wizards and Muggles who trade unlawfully will be investigated and punished. You can expect a raft of new prosecutions very shortly, going right to the top of the Ministry."

Struggling to hide the appeal of that promise, Meddok tried a new avenue of challenge. "The Minister seems to think the launch has been postponed, not abandoned."

"The Galleon will not be floated. I will not allow it. Anything else?"

Since there were only five of them, far less than the full board, Lucius presumed they meant to speak frankly, and the quicker they got to the point, the sooner he could be away. 

"Loan defaults," said the Chairman. "All of this uncertainty has driven up the price of Muggle goods. More than half of our wizarding customers are overstretched already, on electronic items especially, with their negligible resale value. We are foreclosing on dozens of loans every day – to our loss, Lucius. To our very significant loss."

This was the language of the gauntlet. Only a fool asked a goblin to put principle before profit. 

"I understand. However, if your balance book is suffering, the Muggle institutions' losses will be far greater, since they did the bulk of the lending. I think we can all envisage a future where they are driven from the market altogether."

The word "monopoly" had recently become a vogue term of derision; certainly no-one spoke it now. The Chairman, in any case, was not appeased. 

"We do not have a single profitable line of business at present. It cannot go on. We will not endure it very much longer."

Lucius gave a thoughtful nod. "Understood. You will not be asked to."

That had not been a consultation, he was well aware, but an ultimatum. He had known that the goblins were fair-weather allies; he had known that their support depended entirely upon their faith in his ability to deliver; he had known that they would abandon him the moment his plan appeared to falter; he had always intended to depart in some respects from their mutual designs. He had, however, expected a little more time before they turned on him, and he absolutely could not afford another enemy at present. 

"Your young man," the Chairman observed, bitter and provocative, when they were alone, "appears to have a most independent cast of mind. I do hope you have not underestimated him."

He found out the answer to that riddle when he returned to his office. The Quibbler's special edition bore Potter's face on its cover – a fairly recent shot picking his way down the barricade with the sun behind the camera throwing his shadow like an enormous cloak behind him – and an inside interview. It consisted of comments smuggled out of Azkaban by some sympathetic guard – no doubt Emma Peck had already discovered and punished the offender – all of a highly predictable ilk. "Who benefits from derailing the election process when I looked pretty certain to win it?" he was quoted as saying. "That will tell you who's committed undemocratic conduct. I've got nothing to hide – I speak for myself, I think for myself and I say what I believe. Only the electorate has the right to judge me, and I'm waiting for Fudge to let that happen." He had not, he supposed, truly expected Potter to bear it quietly. 

"Yes?" he snapped at the intruder, who turned out to be Weasley, hanging cautiously onto the door handle and letting the noise from outside into his office. "What is that racket?"

Weasley's caution took on a new, wary note.

"A protest," he said, and tested the silence to see if he should say more. "Another Muggle appliance fatality. Siegfried Abbott, seventy-something, resident of Mould-on-the-Wold. Electrified while repairing his television – the usual story, manufacturer dishonoured the warranty because the product had been magic-tampered. So he tried some home maintenance. Spellwork and live wires mixed badly. Most of the photographs aren't printable but you can count on one or two in tomorrow's Prophet. Muggle Advisory are dealing with it – ineptly if you ask me."

"Thank you, Percy."

"And the Minister wants you. Urgently."

The door swung closed behind him. 

An only child and not given to compromise, Lucius had always been solitary, but for one weak-willed moment he found himself wishing for an accomplice in this endeavour. For his resourceful Narcissa, his father, his son, for Tom in his younger days, for treacherous Severus, or even for those leisurely evenings sharing Potter's bed. But he poured himself a half glass of water from the jug on his desk and washed down the feeling. There was no-one to turn to and his visit to Potter's cell would have to be postponed once more. 

"I suggest taking the initiative," Lucius opined blithely as he took his seat by Cornelius's desk. "If they suggest a restriction on the sale of Muggle appliances, the Ministry must respond with a complete ban. I have taken the liberty of drafting the beginnings of a decree."

He brandished the half-filled parchment all too briefly for anyone to make out how rudimentary his notes had been under the jerking of the lift. The Minister flicked a haggard glance at the black curtain concealing the enormous screen that had been gifted to him in the early days of the Muggle glasnost. "Out of the question, Lucius. And beside the point in any case. We have more important matters to discuss than Muggle knick-knacks."

"How then," he replied with acid pleasantness, "may I assist?"

The Minister pushed a thick wad of paper across the desk to him, bound with a black plastic clip and feathered with adhesive yellow rectangles. Lucius leafed through it.

"What is this?"

From the table behind him, Rachel the financiers' representative answered. "The project finance deed. Signed by the Minister seven months ago next week."

"Well, yes, but it was really no more than an in-principle-"

"And witnessed by the Prime Minister himself as a gesture of support."

This time Cornelius had no response beyond a frustrated flush.

Rachel continued, "The Minister has some difficulty with the interpretation of clauses 46 and 47, if you would be so good as to read them."

Obliging her, Lucius did not need to be schooled in Muggle law to appreciate the Minister's dilemma. Rash options occurred to him – the deed and the necessary memories could be modified by spellwork, except that a second copy was bound to exist somewhere in the glittering towers of Canary Wharf; otherwise the land would need to be cursed or sabotaged to a degree that left no option but a hasty sale. Muggle ownership of Diagon Alley's premier vacant site would be instant electoral suicide – and in any case, unthinkable.

"Your thoughts, Lucius?" Rachel prompted. "The language is abundantly clear. If the Ministry defaults on any of the essential terms, including but not limited to the representations in clauses 32 and 39 regarding commencement date and site security, the project may be wound up and any shortfall recovered by Financiers assuming ownership of the site."

If he had caught the slightest trace of gloating in her pronouncement, he might have forgiven her, but the collapse of the magical world's first development project did not even appear to rouse her to that. "That is one arguable interpretation."

"That's ridiculous!"

"Quite standard provisions, I'm afraid, Minister," Rachel advised in exactly the same matter-of-fact tone she would doubtless have used to announce a death sentence or a fatal diagnosis. "Although, naturally, our preference is not to enforce these rights, so long as there is some concrete reassurance of the development reaching a successful conclusion."

Everybody knew what she meant. An example. Potter's head on a plate, and a full list of his co-conspirators – far more than Lucius could deliver.

"Oh fiddle-faddle!" said the Minister, blustering hopelessly. "We've come this far – no sense in losing our nerve now. No sense in spoiling the friendship."

Julian looked up, finally, from his little hand-held computer. "Insurers are in favour of termination unless tangible progress is made before the recall of the Wizengamot on Monday," he said, indicating just how highly he valued the friendship. 

Lucius rose to leave, avoiding Julian's triumphant glance because, for once, he did not feel confident of keeping his temper under control. 

**

On his desk when he returned was another petition. Weasley had diverted it from the Minister's immediate attention in an act, Lucius suspected, of pure self-protection. Prominent on the petition was the name of Weasley's father, along with the Granger woman and her fiancé, various other Weasleys, Minerva McGonagall and the most part of Hogwarts' Board and staff, and what looked like almost one thousand other names. Scrupulously refusing to let his official position facilitate family advantage, Percy had sought to filter this overture through Lucius's hands. Somewhat less scrupulously, Lucius tossed the petition with the others into his bottom drawer. He had, despite himself, underestimated the dedication of Potter's defenders. This growing public outcry was more powerful than he had allowed for, tapping as it did directly into the vein of anger over the undemocratic conduct laws. 

His ambitious strategy was pulling away from him. Some events were speeding on too soon, others too slowly. On the corner of his desk lay a letter from the City of London Crown Prosecution Service confirming that the Bobbin assault trial would be called on the following week, barring new technical applications by the defence. That meant a verdict ten days away at least. At that rate, there might be nothing left for him to salvage. 

The shrill sound of the telephone startled him into movement and, with a glare of fatigue, he picked it up. The report was brief.

"With whom?" he enquired. "Act now. On no account must Mrs Harrington-Blotts be allowed to set foot on that boat. Detain her with whatever force is necessary, but see that she comes to no harm. Report to me this evening – this is inexcusable."

He slammed the receiver back into its cradle. It would be Cornelius's supporters, no doubt, who had allowed her to evade her house arrest. From the other side of the Channel, she would cause the Ministry a great deal less discomfort, but Lucius found her more useful at close hand and here it was vitally important that she stay. The matter demanded his personal attention. However, there was another errand he had put off too long already. He left his office in a whipcrack stride, furious at being forced to leave this delicate task in less competent hands. 

"Not now," he barked at the hooded figure lurking outside his door, but in the space of two steps he had recognised the coiled posture and drawn to a halt. 

"We won't wait for your convenience, I'm afraid. You've done very well for yourself lately. Now it's time to answer to the ones who put you here."

Rookwood had worked nineteen years for the Ministry. Even in his current ignominy, he would not be without friends in the building. "Tell Rabastan that I have not forgotten. We will speak shortly."

"You have twenty four hours, Lucius. Your wavering loyalty hardly gives us cause for patience."

There was no time for an argument for which, in any case, he could not produce unequivocal proof. "I will be in contact. Shortly."

With that, he resumed his stride.

"Azkaban again?" came the voice from behind him. "If you'd rather have him disposed of, it can be arranged."

He kept walking, one foot in front of the other. What showed on his face would have revealed too much.

**

"Keep your distance," Lucius snapped at the guard as he swept out of the fireplace at Azkaban and into the corridor. 

Almost five hours later now than he'd intended, on-edge and hungry and short of breath, he hastened down flight after flight of stairs. He tensed further at the familiar chill that only this place could produce and at the approaching dread of the Dementors. Taken at speed, the alternation between patches of light and darkness was dizzying, and he knew he should have stopped to regather himself before entering the cell but time did not permit it. He fortified himself with a deep breath as he threw open the door. 

And stopped, dumbstruck. In a circle of bright light in the middle of the room, Potter sat, still strapped to his chair. Two days, however, had seen a change of tactics. A black felt hood covered his head, belted tightly around his neck, and apart from that he wore nothing but the pair of underpants in which he'd been arrested – soiled now, and damp, leaving him naked and visibly shivering. 

"Mr Malfoy," said Emma Peck.

Potter jerked in his chair and gave a hoarse snarl that barely made it out of his parched sounding throat. All at once, a bucket swung out of the shadows and drenched him in water, hood and all. The muscles down his arms and chest spasmed weakly and resumed their tremors as his jaw stretched wide and sucked in a mouthful of the hood, desperately trying to draw air through the soaked cloth. Between his spread and shackled legs, the cotton of his underpants sagged over the limp outline of his penis. The horrible bubbling sound went on and on and on in the black hollow where his mouth was. Lucius watched him struggle, jostling the chair legs in his desperate attempt to breathe.

The wand came to his hand unbidden. His arm swept in a terrible arc that did not stop until the bucket was torn free and slammed into the wall, its metal rim piercing the stone and embedding itself with a shrieking grate. A man was screaming – not Potter, without looking he knew that Potter was holding himself perfectly still – and Emma Peck was saying "Stop!" – and there was a bloody smell in the air. A movement at the edge of his vision caught his attention and he spun around to see the man with the recording device easing out of his seat. Another swing of his arm sent the device spinning towards the wall where it splintered, small parts flying so that the man had to shield his face with his arms. The body of it cracked as it struck the ground. With one final wandstroke, he shattered the silver disc that protruded from its gaping aperture.

"Malfoy!" Emma Peck forgot the trappings of courtesy as she strode towards him as if he were no more than her lapdog Death Eater informant. She hit the wall hard in the wake of his banishing spell.

"For heaven's sake, we are wizards." If he was not shouting outright, he was hurling his words like spat venom, each syllable mangled between his lips and spraying saliva. His face would be one writhing mask of tendons with the smooth skin of diplomacy ripped right off it. "Barbaric! This is fit for – _expelliarmus!_ "

The scribe who made a step towards him rebounded off the wall with a sickening crunch and wilted and the man who had wielded the bucket curled around his bloodied mess of a hand and rocked himself and moaned. The cleaning spell Lucius swept over the dirty floor was so strong that it stripped away a layer of stone and left a pile of rubble heaped against the wall. He cast a less abrasive version over Potter himself, who drew a shuddering breath, and he used his hands to loosen the straps that fastened the black hood. Working briskly, he kept his attention on practical matters and did not look up into the glistening green eyes. There was a pile of discarded prison garments in the corner and Lucius summoned them with a word to slide a shirt down behind Potter's back and around his shoulders. 

"Get back!" Another banishing spell and he threw a curtain of smoke over the room that left the others feeling around in it for their wands while he drew three hairs from his head and reached back to wind them around Potter's left ankle, three times, tying a knot and slipping them just inside the shackle. Only once he'd set the charm did he have the luxury of glancing up. 

Despite the red-veined eyes and the feverish sheen of his skin, Potter's focus was unmoving, fixed on Lucius's face. The message in his expression was not loathing. It wasn't trust either. It was a penetrating sort of curiosity.

"Malfoy, what in god's name do you think you're doing?"

Behind the interrogation chair, Emma Peck emerged through the smoke, wand drawn. Thank the heavens for her contemptuous, severe little face. It told him how extraordinary his behaviour was. It told him how close he was to watching everything slip through his fingers. 

He stood. "These methods are unacceptable for use on any prisoner, even Potter. If it becomes known, the Minister will have no alternative but to renounce you."

"Will he?" she answered coolly. "You might ask him, then, why he sent down a dossier of information on military interrogation techniques."

"That," said Lucius, subduing both anger and reluctant admiration for the preening reinsurer, "will have been sent to you in error. I shall return it to the Minister."

"And all this equipment?"

"Will need to be replaced," Lucius told her with an unhelpful smile. A flick of his wrist dispersed the rest of the smoke.

"Malfoy."

The command in Potter's voice belied his helpless state. To avoid any suggestion of responding to it, he cupped his hand under Potter's chin and jerked his face up. The hair fell back from the pale knitted skin of his scar, the scar that always looked so much darker and bolder in the photographs from his celebrated youth. But Potter's eyes were unbowed as he relaxed into Lucius's grip, his jaw becoming pliant against Lucius's palm apart from the soft graze of bristle over his skin. Potter had had weeks now to learn the triggers that fuelled Lucius's desire, and he had put every minute to good use. 

"There will be no more of these crass Muggle methods." Lucius kept his voice dry and businesslike, avoiding any hint of the tempting caress. "You will be transferred to the Ministry building for closer observation."

The prisoner tilted his head back to expose a little more of his throat. He was Potter; he would clutch whatever improvised weapons he could bring to hand, and he would fight. 

A flicker of tongue wet Potter's top lip; his breathing deepened; his gaze did not waver. "Put me in front of the Wizengamot. I can't tell them anything about Avalon Towers – there's no grand conspiracy, there never has been. I don't want to make more trouble. We've got problems enough already and it's going to take a lot of work to fix them. Let me help."

Lucius released him abruptly and slid his hand into his pocket. He talked with a statesman's sincerity but the part and flex of his lips was pure courtesan. His half-naked body no longer looked vulnerable. The muscles across his chest and stomach tightened subtly into powerful, exquisite lines and for one weak moment, Lucius had almost reached out to touch him. 

"The Wizengamot is in suspension," he said curtly. "You can help matters by not interfering in them."

The man cradling the remains of his hand had dragged himself to his knees in a lurching attempt to stand. Lucius walked away from the wreckage without another word. 

**

It took a long time and a great deal of hot water to drive the day's stress from his spine, along with the smell of smoke and the trace of Potter's sweat that lingered beneath his fingernails. When he sat up in the bath, the dangling strands of his hair dripped cold water onto his shoulders. The grey mark on his forearm looked starker and fresher above the froth of the water. 

Decades ago, in the second year of his marriage, when his political activities had drawn him away from home and Narcissa had shown signs of straying, he had disposed of the suspected affair with a few cold-blooded words across the breakfast table, three unhurried days after it had come to his attention. Nothing more animated than that. Even though, without doubt, the paternity of his then unconceived heir had been at stake, Lucius had felt sexual jealousy only as distantly as the moon's subtle gravity. The thought of rousing himself to violence would have struck him, then, as absurd.

**

He met Arthur Weasley in the Leaky Cauldron on Saturday afternoon, not by chance. 

"I've had better days," Weasley answered him, pausing with his five pints lined up on the bar. "But of course you'd know all about that."

The man whom chance circumstances had recently made Minister of Muggle Relations was dressed in loose denim and a glossy blue jacket that bore the banner of a foreign Muggle sporting team, not only ridiculous but traitorous too. Nonetheless, Lucius was the epitome of civility. "Yes, I had heard rumour of your family's difficulties. No doubt you've explained the situation to Muggle Advisory's enforcers, and ..."

Weasley gave an extremely grim laugh. "You'll appreciate this, Lucius. You of all people. My own department understands everything. No harm done, or next to none, and what man doesn't have a bit of a fireside chat with his sons after supper? It's hardly a crime if they happen to talk about his work, and a chat is just a chat even if he happens to be a Minister. No, the wizards understand all right. It's the Muggles who want blood. Their Financial Servicing Authority is on the telephone so bloody often it'd be a blessing to have the lines pulled out."

Lucius carefully contemplated the row of liqueur bottles above the bar. He spoke softly. "I wish you luck in extricating yourself, at least, from this dreadful mess. Your two sons, on the other hand. Word has it they were caught with an extraordinary cache of galleons which their business records alone could not come close to explaining, and a good deal of money borrowed from dissatisfied friends and acquaintances." 

"You're very well informed, Lucius." Weasley shuffled his five glasses together and tried to muster them all in his hands. The glossy new jacket only served to emphasise the dullness of his thin hair and the furrowed skin at his eyes and forehead. Weasley had been brought up nearly five decades as a wizard and the Muggle pace of life appeared to be wearing the zest out of him. "The evidence doesn't look good, I make no bones about that. The boys have got some explaining to do." 

Lucius dropped his voice further.

"Hoarding galleons is hardly something that can be explained, surely. Not when the black market is moving emphatically in the other direction and only a select few ministers were aware of the artificially high rate at which the Galleon was to be floated." Lucius beckoned to the barman as Weasley slowly levitated the glasses. "A father might consider sending them overseas rather quickly." He casually drew Weasley's attention to the sign above the bar whose black capitals prohibited magic in the vicinity of alcohol. The drinks clattered back onto the bar top. "Ideally on some mission of public service. After all, it would hardly be in the Minister's interests to fuel the scandal by pursuing them into exile. Ogdens, straight, thank you." 

Weasley's hard look conveyed disbelief at finding himself discussing his sons' future with a Death Eater and a convict and a longstanding enemy. Clearly he did not believe Lucius's sudden ascendancy to be anything other than the product of treachery.

"Percy is a promising young man," Lucius offered by way of explanation. "Cut from quite a different cloth from his brothers. A quick resolution may leave his prospects untarnished."

By the time Weasley returned for the last two glasses, Lucius had downed his drink and departed. 

**

On an overcast afternoon, the Avalon Towers site made a sinister spectacle. In the blur of stirred dust and faint rain, the rim around the pit crawled with heavy earthmovers and the air was scored with the masts of cranes. At the rear, two steel girders rose out of an uneven base of poorly set concrete, temporarily reinforced with magic to facilitate the illusion of progress. Two empty arms reaching skyward; two inert wands threatening the black clouds above; two hostile towers, bare and foreign. Apart from a scattering of Muggle supervisors in their orange vests who stuck to the safety of the street, there was no visible evidence of any human presence behind the machinery. 

What dim light there was came from behind the site, casting the metal in a black silhouette. The outline of the girder, the crane behind it and its dangling chain and hook made the ominous shape of a gallows, at least to Lucius's eyes as he resumed his journey, leaning into the thickening rain and setting himself to his purpose.

** 

Once a wasteland after hours, the Ministry's new overtime culture saw it fairly well populated on a Sunday evening. The statistics – at least the optimistic, quotable kind that snagged in Cornelius's mind – confirmed that two thirds of the Ministry's pre-democratic workforce now accomplished nearly twice as much work. Quantity was paramount in the Muggle world. Everything that could be measured was measured – and tabulated, analysed, graphed, indexed and distributed. Quality, which had no weight, no dimensions and no exchange rate, was not part of the Muggle mathematics. 

The queue at the coffee stand was some five metres long and a bad-tempered crowed thronged around the drinks machine trying to scrounge enough Muggle coins for a cola – a tiresome necessity since the prompt sacking of a compliance officer in Magical Creatures for transfiguring Knuts. A frustrated customer slammed the magic-proofed panel and swore as Lucius passed, exhibiting the sort of impotent rage that could have been cured by an afternoon on the Quidditch pitch or a good competitive duel. 

Percy Weasley was alone in the Minister's suite, leaning over a folio of papers with his fingers clenched in his hair. 

"Exile," he said without looking up.

Lucius stopped at the foot of the table. Weasley's robes were crumpled and a curdled cup of tea stood at his elbow. It was a curiously perspicacious suggestion.

"For whom?"

Weasley turned a dry pair of eyes up to him. "Who else? Potter." He jerked his hand towards his papers. "It's the only way out. Keeping him in custody makes us look like idiots. Releasing him is weak. And this – this is unthinkable."

The shuddering curve of his upper lip said that he had stumbled upon Julian's memorandum and, no matter with what niceties it might be phrased, still found the concept of torture unconscionable. 

"The Minister is obliged to-"

"No!" Weasley snapped, hoarse and appalled as the flat of his hand slammed on the table. "Bloody hell, it's about time we learned from the Muggles' mistakes instead of following them. You knew about this, did you?" 

The tight mouth that hoped for a denial was gratifying for Lucius; the uncharacteristic discourtesy was not. "I knew."

Weasley pushed the pages away from him in disgust. If he fought this battle, he would fight it alone, he must have known. And in the end, he would only be coerced into consenting.

Lucius spoke more gently. "You've spent every waking moment in this office for a week or more. Haven't you?" Weasley's parched, pale lips were answer enough. "Spend tomorrow at home – your health demands it. If it takes a direct command from the Minister, you know I can arrange it."

Weasley's averted gaze sagged with guilt. What Lucius asked was dereliction of duty. Lucius came down the side of the table, slid the pages back into their folder, and removed it.

"Percy. Go home. There is nothing you can accomplish here." 

Veering slightly as he walked, Weasley halted at the door. "Tuesday," he said curtly. "Thank you." Lucius busied himself re-arranging the chairs to discourage him from saying anything more.

He took up a seat at the Minister's right hand, where no important document could escape his examination and slipped, as he often did, into the role of host, welcoming the representatives from the financiers, the construction company, the liaison from the Muggle Department of Communities and Local Government, the commander of the military contingent and Mrs Peck's superior at the Muggle Advisory Office, before the Minister himself made a flustered entrance. 

"I want new laws passed," he grumbled as he took his seat. "They're a public nuisance. Fifty of them at least on the portico, and one of them let off a Dungbomb as I passed. As though a head of state would listen to rabble like that. What do they want, Percy?"

Lucius stepped briskly into the breach. "I'm afraid Percy has been called away to a family emergency, Minister. I think you'll find their causes are mixed. Many of them want a firmer stance on the perpetrators of the Bobbin assault, some are Potter's supporters, and I believe a number of them are family of the deceased Siegfried Abbott." 

"Well they can't stay outside making all that noise. I won't allow it." Taking a blank paper square from the box on his desk, the Minister scrawled a brief instruction and sent it on its way.

Lucius spared a dismissive glance for the reinsurer's representative who sauntered in last and dragged a chair to his habitual territory in the centre of the gathering. 

Time did not allow for pleasantries before the discussion began. The site supervisor's terse report was full of half-truths that nobody cared to challenge, given the stakes. Two girders was, undeniably, progress, but with a quirk of her fine-plucked eyebrow, Rachel all-but demolished them.

"Can you guarantee that this modest achievement will not be undone by further acts of sabotage?"

The site supervisor shrugged. It came back to Potter, of course. His name had been the unspoken presence in every one of their discussions over the last few days, his shadow all the larger now that he was housed several floors beneath their feet. And this time he would have to be acknowledged. 

"My people have done everything they can," said the Director of Enforcement, a straight-backed man from Muggle Advisory who appeared to budget such luxuries as smiles and inflections as carefully as public Galleons. "The prisoner is determined not to talk. If any information is to be obtained from him, stronger methods will be required."

That was the sort of ultimatum to which no career-minded individual wished to reply.

"Minister?" Rachel prompted. 

As Cornelius looked up from the biro he was twisting around, the click of its tip protruding and retracting filled the room with the rhythm of indecision. His smile these days had thinned down to a grimace. "Far be it for me to interfere with the procedures of the Muggle Advisory Office. I leave this entirely to your discretion."

The Director of Enforcement had been sensible enough to see that trap even before Lucius's precautionary visit to his office. "Unfortunately, Minister, the regulations don't leave me a great deal of discretion."

Cornelius leaned back in his chair to bring Lucius into his field of vision, looking to him, as always, for the lifeline nobody else would throw. The time had come, however, to let him sink. 

"If the Wizengamot votes to repeal the undemocratic behaviour laws tomorrow, there will be no further basis to keep Potter in custody. Unless a confession is obtained that links him directly to the sabotage. Time is short." 

Plastic and metal clicked furiously. The Minister's anguished face sought out an answer in the polished wood of his desk top. It was in nobody's interests to help him. 

"Well then," he said finally, looking up as he squared his shoulders with Napoleonic gravitas. "I don't suppose we have any choice. With profound regret – the profoundest regret – I am forced to authorise the use of stronger methods."

The liaison from Communities and Local Government found her voice. "What sort of methods are we talking about?" 

"That," Lucius said with a dainty hint of reproach, "is a question for the experts."

And he set about the painstaking task of appearing to draft an appropriate interim decree. The Minister, when he cast his eye over it, did not seem to see anything amiss. He gave the pen one last flick and raised it.

"Oh no, Lucius." Julian's meticulous fingers spread themselves out over the corner of the paper as he leaned right across the desk. "Your language is unnecessarily blunt. Try 'direct physical methods' instead."

Their eyes met over the desk. It was somewhat demeaning to resort to magic when carefully wielded words ought to have accomplished his task, but time did not permit vanity. Lucius broke into the young man's mind without preamble, finding clean thought-lines and a background hum of unsleeping ambition. He thrust harder with the spell. Julian's knuckles went white on the desk top.

"No changes are necessary," Lucius said softly. He felt, out of nowhere, a tug at his ankle, well inside his boot, and ignored it. "Your signature, if you please, Minister. No sense in delay."

Lips drawing back under the strain of fighting the disorientating intrusion in his mind, Julian gasped out one more objection. "Wait until tomorrow. Until we see what-"

"You don't look well, Julian. Take a seat and someone will fetch you a glass of water." Legilimency was not mind control, but for a victim unused to it, the sensation was unsettling enough to render them vulnerable to persuasion. "Take a seat."

There was another tug at his ankle, stronger this time, the coiled strands of hair cutting into his flesh as the sister strands around Potter's ankle sent out their message of urgency, pain and threat. The Minister's pen hovered as Julian wilted back into his chair, still dazed by the thuggery of Lucius's intruding thoughts. 

"Shall we have this distasteful business done with, Minister?"

And yet the paper seemed to repel the biro. Cornelius's hand, now that it had grasped the flimsiest thread of an alternative, could not be brought to descend. "Yes, tomorrow will do just as well. Perhaps the Wizengamot won't meet at all. Or Potter may very well decide to talk. Let's not be hasty."

When their working relationship had begun, Cornelius had been a biddable buffoon. Now, the approval of over ten thousand voters had turned him stubborn. It was a very long time since anybody had held sufficient seniority to tell him when he was being a fool. Lucius, at the moment, came closest. 

"This is no time for dithering," he said with discernible hiss of displeasure. 

The painfully tight charm at his ankle gave one last urgent jerk and plunged his foot into numbness. The Minister's fingers relaxed around his pen. 

Lucius stood abruptly. "Excuse me."

A few moments later, he was out in the corridor, and a few moments after that, moving at a run. The lift, automatically prioritising the Minister's floor, was quick in its descent and in any event, as he soon discovered, the corridors had been almost emptied by the Minister's call to disburse the protesters from the portico. On the level of the courtrooms, there was no sign of Mrs Peck's officer outside the holding cells and the door was ajar. From inside it came the voice he least wished to hear. 

He threw the door fully open. Potter's chair lay sprawled on its side, its occupant still shackled to it, struggling and snarling with his jaw split open on the floor and smearing the stone in blood. Dawlish had one hand wrenched in Potter's hair and the other jabbing the point of his wand into Potter's voice box, sending his snarls up a few notes in pain. 

Lucius petrified one of the two Aurors who appeared to form Dawlish's guard and cast him back through the door. 

"Get rid of him," Dawlish barked without turning, but the last Auror held back, wand undrawn. He was watching Lucius with extreme caution, holding himself ready to flee and Lucius, casting the spell that knocked him out, understood why. His face ached with the grimace on it, stretched out with a fury he made no attempt to rein in. To all the world, he was a man with a violent past whom the death of his loved ones had freed from all sense of moderation. He had no mercy and, now, nothing to lose. There was no limit on what he might do.

Preferring the brutality of physical violence, Lucius sheathed his wand and wrenched Dawlish up with his hands. Sparing one moment to strip him of his wand, he threw him bodily against the wall, producing a grunt of pain as skull struck stone. With his hands fisted in the official Auror robes, part strength and part magic he thrust Dawlish up off the ground and watched the flinch of the burned skin across his face and the very faint blur of lidless white eyes behind the dark glasses. 

“If you think for a moment, Dawlish, that any part of me will shrink from striking a blind man then you have sorely underestimated me. This is my business. If you lay a finger on Potter – if your vicious yearnings do the slightest thing to sabotage my ability to get hard information from him, then the Minister will know of it. And I will know of it sooner." He leaned in close so that his breath fell on scarred skin and hissed, "A man reduced to four senses should be careful not to find himself deprived of any more.”

He shoved Dawlish unceremoniously out of the room and slammed the heavy door, locking it with a twist of his wrist, and kicked both discarded wands into the corner, far from reach. Potter was watching him from his sidelong position on the floor, pausing in his attempt to get free of his bindings. His expression was not welcoming. 

"I take it you are not badly injured," Lucius said as he bent on one knee to lift Potter's head and get a good look at his wound. 

Potter jerked his head free. "I don't want your help." 

Without deigning to respond, Lucius stood. 

"Whatever you're doing to Ron and George has to stop now," Potter went on, stopping to spit blood out of the corner of his mouth. "They've done no serious harm but this prosecution will finish them off. And Neville still hasn't been transferred to St Mungo's – the guards say his lung could collapse without treatment. What for? There's no reason to drag them into this. I made my own choices but they've got nothing to do with it. You're going to get the charges against all of them dropped. Otherwise I will tell them every last fucking thing."

Lucius righted Potter's chair without, for a moment, loosening the shackles. 

"I will talk, Lucius."

"Have a care," Lucius said in a very low voice. "I won't need to force Dawlish's hand to have you harmed. All he wants is the opportunity."

Potter tested his restraints and found them unyielding. "You need me. You must do. Merlin knows you had opportunity enough to get rid of me if that was what suited you. I'll play your game, Lucius, as long as I don't have any other choice. But I've told you my price."

A touch of Lucius's wand healed the tears in his clothes and drove out the stains.

"A confession will earn you nothing but a prompt conviction. And you might think carefully about how the Muggle lovers will treat you, a failed politician in league with a Death Eater. Your custodial term would not be a comfortable one."

In contrast with the blood on his face, Potter's manner was perfectly controlled. "Do you think I care what happens to me if that's what it takes to stop you?"

As Lucius stepped back, the change in Potter caught him off guard. Black hair unkempt, jaw shaded emphatically with coarse growth, clad in the uncharacteristic white of the prison robes, and with his piercing eyes even more direct in the absence of his glasses, he was not quite the man Lucius had taken into his bed. Lucius's betrayal, as anticipated, had wrought another level of evolution in him. His present fierce will was entirely passionless and that gave Lucius a tremor of doubt. 

"Your friends have each chosen their own course-"

"Not Hermione."

"Except Miss Granger, who may blame her suspension on her fiancé's foolishness. The others have made their choices. They do not look to you to save them. You may remove me from what influence I have, certainly; you have always possessed that advantage. If you prefer to leave Cornelius's regime unchallenged, you have the power, by all means, to make it happen." 

"At least he's elected." Potter's deliberate diction sent a fine red spray into the air. Lucius allowed the silence to linger, leaving time for the superficiality of Potter's own words to sink in.

"You know my principles, Harry. They are, on the whole, the same as yours and the current Ministry is opposed to every one of them. Your choice is between the welfare of the nation and the comfort of your dear friends."

Potter's stare did not waver. "You've heard my terms."

When he wiped Potter's face and neck clean, he held back from a touch of tenderness that would only have been construed as duplicitous. With brisk strokes, he avoided lingering on the contours of the body his hands and mouth had known, banishing sentiment entirely from the act. He pocketed his handkerchief without looking at the stains on it.

"I think our paths will not cross again until your choice has played itself out," he said. "Choose carefully."

**

Those had been his parting words but, truth be told, he still had a number of choices to make himself, and Potter's performance had only made them more difficult. On returning to the Manor's dark foyer, he lit the torches with an irritated slash of his wand and looked forward to the day when he might once again have house elves at his disposal. 

If Potter spoke, he must be destroyed. If not, there was the slenderest chance of another course of action. And, Lucius confessed with a reluctant trace of approval, he could not be sure which way Potter would turn. Since the library, where a great deal of Potter's education had taken place, mocked him with memories, he took up his glass and his quill and sought out the calm of the conservatory. Potter gave every appearance of having acquired the qualities and the opinions that Lucius needed. But that wilfulness in him could not be broken. In the following few days, the campaign to subject Potter to torture would come to fruition. And whichever way he planned it out, Lucius would have to be there to watch.

The ambling path, against all expectation, was illuminated with several of its seldom used torches ablaze. Wand drawn, Lucius followed the trail of light deeper into the foliage, into the shadow of Narcissa's rose bower and through it. Far beyond, a figure perched on the bench, silhouetted by faint torchlight. With a silencing spell on the pebbles beneath his feet, Lucius approached. The light glinted off white feathers in the intruder's lap and with a start Lucius recognised the form of one of his Occamy, twining familiarly around a proffered hand and up around the cloaked shoulders. The figure's face was turned from him, but its hair was the sort of dull black that came from cheap dye or repeated spellwork.

Lucius quelled the silencing charm and halted. The stranger turned to him. "Hello Father," said Draco, unflinching.

**

The luxury of time would have allowed him a more leisurely reunion with his son, but he had a great deal to accomplish in this pivotal moment: letters to write, alliances to fortify, strikes to outmanoeuvre and favours to call in. He allowed himself a half-hour conference over the dinner table, keeping to prosaic facts and avoiding altogether the subject of Narcissa's death and Draco's self-imposed exile. They were interrupted no less than three times by the blast of the mobile telephone.

"I left rather suddenly," Draco said by way of explanation after the third call. "When I heard you were back in control, I wanted to come straight away. I knew you'd do it."

His mother's wide eyes sought to disguise the untruth in that. By way of distraction, Draco shrugged off his patched leather jacket and tossed it over the empty chair beside him. It exposed the strand of cheap factory-made beads at his neck and the vulgar ink tattoo with which he had sought to obscure the mark on his forearm. Apart from the ironic mimicry of hair colour, he was opposite to Potter in every way.

"And what do you expect me to do with you now, Draco?"

Draco helped himself to another piece of bread and the hands that tore it bore the scars of spattering frypans and harsh detergent. "I can make myself useful."

**

Monday started bleak and foreboding. The rain had continued all night, searching out the rents in time-weakened spellwork and bringing in a penetrating dampness. It had seeped into the walls of the kitchen, drawing out the smell of stone and mortar as Lucius stood over the little cauldron whose steam made the only movement in the cavernous space. On a bench made to hold dinner plates for one hundred guests, he steeped his carefully blended tea and filled the Runespoor eggshell cup, the only one of Potter's dark artefacts small and useful enough to keep in his own house.

He drank slowly, registering the minute sharpening of his senses as the Runespoor magic did its work. Draco's return was not entirely a relief. The innate confidence of his ancestry gave his son a magnificent facade of fierce will, but Lucius knew well enough what lay behind it. At seven, once his fascination for catching and destroying gnomes had seen the garden all but emptied of them, he had fallen into the habit of crouching unmoving for hours at a time beside a likely hole, the noose of his rope trap concealed around it, investing half a day's energy in that one moment of bloody triumph. And yet the occasional bite wound saw him scurry back to his mother's lap – and the impact of teeth had been nothing compared to the damage done by the slightest reprimand from Lucius's lips.

Although he had been using this kitchen for months, Draco's return had cast it in a new light. His eyes were drawn now to the bare shelves, the brass fittings that should have gleamed, the cupboards empty of bread loaves and flour canisters and last year's apricots in jars. He had, at first, found the absence of the house elves' chatter to be calming. Now the eggcup made a feeble echo as he laid it down. 

Not for the first time, he wondered if any semblance of the old splendour would ever return here. 

**

The journey down Caster Way and into Diagon Alley, more important than ever at this juncture, was instructive. The foul weather had produced an instant and complete stratification of humanity into those who struggled with hostile umbrellas, those who fortified their umbrellas with magic, and those who strolled beneath an effortless repelling charm. 

Lucius, for the sake of inconspicuousness, bore a black umbrella which he shook off in the doorway of Gringotts. The modest foot traffic heading towards the Ministry appeared to be comprised almost entirely of employees at an hour that was, perhaps, too early for the various schools of protesters. 

Although the iron doors had only just been drawn open for the day, there was already a throng inside the bank.

"Well I'm afraid that's not good enough," a man was saying, obviously angry and twice as angry at the damned inconvenience of being made angry. "It's just not good enough."

From an arched doorway not far behind, Meddok watched. Lucius approached the far counter and was quickly ushered through to one of his many vaults. When he emerged a short while later, the dispute had worsened.

"What on earth do you mean, not there?" the same customer was demanding, pink cheeked now beneath his white beard and clearly very uncomfortable with discord. "I know leprechaun gold when I see it and my coins, I tell you, cannot have vanished."

Meddok took control of the matter. "Nothing vanishes from inside Gringotts' walls, I assure you."

"Then take me to my vault."

The goblin managed to convey the hint of a hidden smile. "There is no vault. The account you opened is a vaultless account in the Muggle style. In return for credit and the convenience of withdrawals from our Hogsmeade facility, you do not have access to a vault."

The queue of waiting customers had fanned out a little now, to allow each of them a covert view of the dispute. On one side of the counters, goblins. On the other, displeased wizards. 

"I want to withdraw everything now. Word says that nothing less than cash in my hand is safe at the moment. I'm afraid I must insist. Where have you put my money?"

"In our general fund."

The wizard slumped. His voice, when it resumed, was foreboding. "And what do you do with that?"

"A great deal of it was lent to the Ministry of Magic. Your savings are in Avalon Towers. I'm sure the Minister will be capable of dealing with any queries you may have."

"I want to see the Chairman."

"That is not necessary. He is abroad."

"Wait a moment," broke in a younger woman in a healer's robe. "You still have to give the money back. You can lend it, but you have to give it back on demand. You'll have to find the money somewhere."

Meddok's hand brushed his pocket. "And where do suggest we find it? Do you think we can dig up the foundations of Avalon Towers to get it back?"

"This is a bank!" Another of the customers reached the limits of his patience. "The one thing you have is money. Get it out of one of the vaults."

There was a scandalised hush at the thought of violating another wizard's vault. 

"We don't care how you get it, but get it now. My wife paid seventeen sickles for a bottle of pumpkin juice yesterday – seventeen sickles! We've got to live."

"Go on," said the healer ominously. "Get out the money. Or do we have to go and get it ourselves?"

Meddok's wand was in his hand and each of the tellers drew in his wake. "Gringotts will not be threatened. You have my answer. The vaultless accounts will not be redeemed until Avalon Towers is complete. There is no reason for you to stay. Leave."

Several generations of wizards had never seen a goblin wielding a wand. The sight of a line of them, with their dark eyes unsympathetic and their unknown magic simmering, was shocking, even to Lucius. As one, the customers stepped back.

"Now, listen-"

"Leave." 

Only the healer stood her ground, arms crossed. Meddok lowered his wand to point precisely at her heart. She shifted one arm to cover it as she, too, backed away.

"I shall be making a complaint to the Minister," she told him crisply. 

He followed her to the doors and began to pull one of them closed. "Be my guest."

As Lucius suspected, his presence had been neither unobserved nor coincidental.

"This is intolerable, Malfoy," Meddok said. "This is the third time we have had to defend ourselves against violent threats from wizards. The damage has gone far beyond what was agreed. We will not re-open until you have restored stability." 

Noting the younger goblin's evident glee in the conflict, in the risk, and in the fact that dealings between them were finally reduced to crude ultimatums, Lucius held his velvet-wrapped parcel tightly against his side and adopted his most conciliatory tone. "Certainly. Where is your grandfather?"

Meddok simply indicated the narrowing gap between the closing doors. "You were warned. This way please."

**

The traffic thickened as Lucius wove his umbrella through it, setting his swiftest pace for the Ministry building. The rumour that the boycotting members of the Wizengamot would return for the sole purpose of overturning the undemocratic conduct laws had spread far and wide and it appeared that a great many people wished to be present to witness the demise of the unpopular laws. He hurried past the closed doors of Madam Malkin's, the abandoned fit-out on the old Fortescue's site, and the hostile graffiti painted on the windows of the store which sold Muggle electronics. The surrounding conversations made it clear that the misdemeanours of Arthur Weasley's sons had become public knowledge, too, and while a few were present for support, most simply wanted to see he how he would bear up to the scandal. 

The anti-building advocates were there already, gathered in shadow at the far end of the portico. The now bankrupt Monty Cartwright, Xenophilius Lovegood, and a group of young men who looked as if they might be Smith's friends, kicking their boots against the steps as if itching to find a provocation to violence. There were many who held Potter's cause dearly, for very different reasons. Among the crowd in the Atrium, he passed two members of the Hogwarts Board whose uncharacteristic loitering could have had no purpose other than lending their support to Potter and the principles by which he lived. 

As the lift bore him downwards, he gave one final thought to the other path he might still take. Easier by far to give way to popular sentiment and simply set Potter free. He could be the one to do it, buy himself a wealth of public credit by loosing Potter's shackles this morning on the Ministry's front steps. There was a way that spared him what lay ahead, but that path was lazy and weak. It would not do.

**

"That was Arthur's swansong then." 

The Minister greeted his arrival with unwarranted optimism. The absence of all of the Muggle advisors only fuelled Lucius's disquiet. 

"I beg your pardon, Minister?"

"His speech, man. The whole building is talking about it. Weren't you there?"

"I'm afraid not, Minister. Would you care to enlighten me?" The crowd in the Atrium had not, perhaps, been idle at all.

"The two sons who were fiddling with the Galleon. Disappeared over the weekend, both of them. One of them's vanished – Potter's friend. It's an open secret that he's on his way to New Zealand. The other one who ran the joke shop – if it's true, Lucius, and I won't believe it until I see it in writing – he's made the other one join the military."

Weapons training, hardship and no magic. Lucius could not have hoped for a more satisfying outcome, unless it could have involved a greater number of Weasley offspring.

"Of course there's no mending the damage to his reputation," Cornelius continued. "Even if he really intends to do it." 

"Minister, I think you'll find he has already done it. It's clear that Arthur means to oppose you. He will have brought this matter to a conclusion to ensure that he is entirely free to do so."

To Cornelius, conflict belonged only in the initial struggle for power. The act of government he expected to be the leisurely exercise of his will, uncontradicted. He wrinkled his lips as if the very taste for leadership were souring in his mouth. 

"Come now," Lucius told him, because he needed Cornelius at his most robust. "The cure is not far off. Once Potter is made to talk, his supporters will be exposed as fools."

Cornelius merely glanced up at him sullenly. He did, however, reach for the silver object which Lucius placed on his desk.

"And if worst comes to worst, perhaps you've earned yourself a spell on the seaside while the mess is put to rights."

There was a particular innocence in Cornelius's smile, on the rare occasions when he gave it spontaneously, that brought to mind the question of who could possibly have convinced him in his youth that politics was a fitting career, and what mischief they had meant to accomplish by doing it.

**

"One moment, sir." 

A young woman snatched at the sleeve of his robe as he left the Minister's suite. He saw at a glance that she was pure Muggle, not even a Squib. 

"They've been looking-" She caught her breath. "-been looking for you all over. Report from the court, sir. The officer says no-one can take a message, he has to speak to you."

He glanced at the time-piece. The Martin Bobbin trial would have commenced a matter of moments ago.

"He left this number, sir. For you to call."

He took the paper carefully by its corner and sent her on her way without thanks. Then he backtracked to Percy Weasley's vacated desk and picked up the telephone.

**

"The interim decree must be signed immediately. The matter has become rather urgent."

Voices sounded from the antechamber where Julian and another advisor were negotiating the sticking charms Lucius had laid down the instant he became aware of their approach. There were, unfortunately, still enough wizards in the building that help would quickly come to hand. 

"What now?" Cornelius asked in a tone that firmly accused Lucius of responsibility.

"The Potter question cannot be left unresolved. The Bobbin trial ended before it began. An arrangement was reached with the prosecution – over our man's very firm objections, of course. As we speak, they are being sentenced to time served. The news has-"

"But the boy very nearly lost an eye!"

"Indeed. The chief perpetrator, however, was never apprehended, and you will recall that Muggles penalise accessories in a much reduced proportion. The pressing concern is that you may expect yet another wave of dissatisfied electors to arrive on your doorstep as soon as this news spreads. A confession, Minister, only a confession from Potter will refocus their attention and cast you in the light of leadership. Your investigators need every form of persuasion available. You must give them the authority they require."

A muffled shout drifted through Lucius's silencing charm. As Lucius located the decree and smoothed it out on the desk, Cornelius eyed it with extreme suspicion. He tested his pen on a paper scrap. 

"They won't-"

"No, Minister. Of course they won't. I shall make sure of it."

 _Cornelius Oswald Fudge,_ he wrote. _MINISTER FOR MAGIC._

**


	5. Martyr

Emma Peck, to her credit, gave a shudder of distaste when he showed her the decree. However, she was first and foremost a public servant. 

"We will begin this afternoon. Do you wish to be present?"

Lucius kept his voice low, because Potter himself was only a few feet away, in the small cell behind the courtroom, from where he watched through the open door. "I advise haste. The Wizengamot is in a militant mood, from what I can gather of the rumours. There is dissent enough to stall the vote with a few hours' debate, but by mid-afternoon you can expect that the laws keeping your prisoner in custody will have been repealed. With full retrospective effect."

Displaying a public servant's mild contempt for the democratic process, she called one of her assistants to her side and exchanged a few efficient words. 

"We can begin in half an hour. The non-magical methods take a little preparation, and a combined approach is believed to produce more effective results. Your decree does not go into detail. I assume the Minister does not have a preference for any particular procedure?"

Lucius rolled the decree and returned it to his pocket. "You have very little time in which to break him. I suggest you summon all the personnel and the equipment you require and use every technique at your disposal."

The part of her that hoped for a reprieve held his gaze. Then she nodded to an assistant, who hurried off in the direction of the lift. 

"What's got you so worried?" came Potter's voice, bravado echoing around the little cell. "The Wizengamot's finally woken up to what you're doing, I suppose. Where's my wand? You'd better have it ready to give it back to me." 

Lucius approached the chair to which he remained shackled. His bare feet were twitching against the ground, a sure indication of the toll of over a week of inactivity on his restless demeanour, but they stilled on sight of Lucius. "Mr Potter, I'm afraid you've been misinformed. Your wand is in Azkaban, where it will stay. The vote is some way off, and the outcome is by no means certain. In any case, you have another round of questioning to submit to before then." 

Evidently pleased to have the distraction of Lucius's presence, Potter slouched in his bindings. "Don't you have anything better to do?"

"This interrogation will be different this time." 

"This time," said Emma Peck, entering the cell behind him, "it won't just be questions. Non-compliance will be punished."

Potter sat up abruptly, pulse and lungs visibly coming to life. As suspected, pain still had the power to distress him. Pain, or helplessness, or both. 

"That's illegal. It's fucking illegal and you know it!" 

In fact, this went beyond distress into the realm of sheer panic. Lucius reprimanded himself for failing to foresee how a personality founded so firmly on determination would have its greatest fear in the complete deprivation of free will. Pain without any capacity for resistance. Under the white prison robes, all the muscles down his arms strained in his shackles. His eyelashes beat fast and the onyx suppressors glowed with the crackle of magic from him. 

"The difference between legal and illegal is merely a matter of words on paper," Lucius said, not ungently. "A worthy contender for leadership would understand this."

His composure had deserted him; his whole face snarled. "You two-faced fucking-"

With a swish of Lucius's wand, Potter's head lolled back and all the tension vanished from him. 

"Was that wise?" frowned Emma Peck.

In order to prevent a confession in the heat of fear and betrayal, certainly. "You saw what he did to the magic inhibitors. In hysteria, he might have broken through them entirely. Neither of us wishes to explain the escape of Britain's most heavily shackled prisoner to the Minister." 

She searched his face for the secret her instincts must have told her was hidden there. 

"Don't be upset, Emma. I'm sure he'll regain consciousness in time for your interrogation."

**

The telephone was ringing when he strode back to his office, but he did not answer it because, when he opened his door, he found the visitor's chair occupied by Margot Harrington-Blotts. He recognised the posture instantly, straight back and arms draped in a dancer's languor, and the dark plait threaded now with grey.

"Forgive this intrusion," she said as she rose. "I'm afraid that, in seeking an explanation of the continuing restrictions on my freedom, I found the Muggle Advisory Office quite inadequate to the task of clarification. Their nervous evasions convinced me that any answers must lie here with you."

Lucius placed the decree, loosely rolled, on his desk as they sat. He did not waste his time and breath pointing out that those very restrictions made her presence here unlawful. "You were quite right to come to me. What modest influence I have is at your disposal."

That brought amusement onto her lips. "Perhaps you might begin by explaining the meaning of this dreadful expression, undemocratic conduct."

"I'm afraid that sort of explanation is beyond me. The law was passed before my time here, but as long as it remains the law, the Minister will see it upheld."

"Lucius," she said, gently impatient. "Your principles have never been a secret. Do you mean to tell me you have reformed so completely that you would participate in the surrendering of what remains of magical London? Muggles living in Diagon Alley – no Malfoy could support that."

He ignored the provocative reference to his tarnished family name. "I believe my choices are commonly ascribed to the lowest sort of opportunism," he said. "I find the word distasteful but I make no defence to the sentiment."

"Do you indeed." Her hands tightened in her lap. 

"Did you not have something to ask for yourself?"

That prompt appeared to pique her interest. "I wish to know the justification for the continuing restrictions on my freedom of movement."

"Your links to the Avalon Towers sabotage are as yet unproven, but at the very least you encourage them. Very recently you tried to leave the country. These are the acts, are they not, of a revolutionary."

"I am no such thing. Call me a overbearing – you would not be the first – but never a zealot."

The sound of the telephone startled them both. Lucius let it ring itself out. He thought he had the measure of her. Under that aloof intellect lay a solid core of moral certainty. Mercurial though she liked to appear, she was predictable. After all, Potter, who despite Lucius's tuition remained a magnet for that particular breed of pure faith, had been drawn to her. 

"What would you do if you found your free movement returned to you?"

She took an instant to conceal her surprise. "I should do as my conscience dictates."

"Will you leave the country?"

She smiled her misleading smile. Her mother's mother had been the last of the Peverells to bear the name, and she had not quite lost the lineage. "It is not my preference."

As he drew a fresh sheet of parchment from the box on his desk and wrote, she asked, "What will happen if I continue to speak out against the building programme and the undemocratic conduct laws?"

"Who can tell?" Lucius equivocated, signing the document. "No doubt you will continue to attract supporters."

"What about Neville Longbottom?"

"He is on his way to St Mungo's as we speak. After which he will be released into his grandmother's care until formal charges can be laid."

"And Harry Potter?"

He passed the paper across to her, the sheen drying from the last of the ink. Her gaze lingered on the decree that was slowly unfurling by his elbow. 

"Potter is beyond my assistance now. I suggest that you direct your concern elsewhere and make haste about it. Now I'm afraid I have a great deal of urgent business."

The telephone rang again and, this time, he answered it. The Martin Bobbin assailants were free men. The free woman in his doorway gave him a final evaluating look and pulled the door closed behind her. 

**

Events had taken on a momentum of their own now, and at all costs he had to stay ahead of them. His last errand took longer than anticipated. By the time he was stepping out back of the Floo in the Atrium, his lungs were raw with exertion. 

People were pouring through the Floo points like the neck of an anthill – alone or joining groups; wandtips protruding from pockets for easy reach. The Atrium's vast space looked shrunken and the nearer he got to the gates, the more strategy and strength it took to force an inconspicuous path through the thickening crowd. They remained bottlenecked at the gate, three hundred or more and growing, waiting for the Wizengamot's decision, for news on Gringotts' closed doors, for word on Potter, for anybody with official status to acknowledge their long-neglected grievances. For the time being, their respect for authority held them back.

"Lucius," murmured a voice at his shoulder as he passed. "This is interesting."

He shoved his way forward without turning. The voice was Rookwood's and he would not have come alone. If he was here, someone among the desperate remnants of the Death Eaters must have been sufficiently attuned to the pitch of the public mood to guess the direction if not the detail of his strategy. Shadowy as they were, his promises to Lestrange had all been breached – all he had delivered them was Smith. The toll of untruths was mounting and he had left Rookwood's previous summons unanswered. He had shown his hand now. The only uncertainty was whether they had come here smelling instability in the air and seeking their own advantage, or to wreak a specific and merciless revenge. Wedded to a lost cause, freed from any credo except destruction, they were the most dangerous of his opponents. They knew the worst of him.

The scale of his ambitions seemed huge to him, as the lift took him downwards, but if nothing else the last few years' humiliation had tested all the limits of his character. He knew himself equal to the task. He swept down the stairs to the lowest level. The four guards in the corridor moved aside for him as he entered. 

They had moved Potter out into the courtroom where they had stripped him down to the loose white prison trousers. Two soldiers supported his spell-stunned body as one of the wizards unreeled a length of rope from his wrist shackles to the iron loop in the ceiling that had once suspended a cage. Even unconsciousness had not quite erased the driven expression from his brow.

When they hauled the rope up, the movement roused him. His dry lips parted and flexed as if he might speak.

"Welcome back," said the older of the soldiers, a sergeant with large, square hands and grey strands in his functionally short hair, giving Potter's chin a rough jerk. His lieutenant fastened the far end of the rope to a ring set in the stone floor. 

Even semi-conscious, Potter struggled. Sluggishly, as if fighting a bad dream, he rolled his shoulders against the rope that held his wrists overhead. As he dragged his eyes open and slowly became aware of his new predicament, Lucius slipped well back into the shadow of the seating banks where Potter, without the aid of his glasses, would be blind to his presence.

When he reached a state of sufficient alertness to remember why he was here, Potter froze. That was something Lucius had never thought to try to school out of him – with his hooked black brows and those light-flecked eyes in their black frame of lashes, he wore his strongest emotions instantly on his face. And those emotions communicated. Lucius had had long enough now to observe how Potter became the centre of any room he walked into. He could not be inconspicuous. Whatever people read in his expressive features, they responded to it, feeling the subconscious flare in their own emotions, one way or another. His fear was plain to see right now, and also the fight in him. 

"Watch where you're looking," said the lieutenant with sudden resentment, shoving him in the centre of his chest so that he stumbled. From his slightly superior height, he stared down at the captive, threatened in the way that all Muggle men were threatened who had spent their whole adult lives navigating their degree of dominance by muscle, only to find themselves faced now with a superior force in magic. He used physical proximity as a weapon, leaning in close to Potter's face. The hair on Potter's neck all-but bristled and the moment the soldier's back was turned, he wound his hands into the rope and jumped, letting his body weight test his restraints as he fell.

The rope, though Muggle-made, was strong and the magically reinforced hook in the ceiling did not even bend. The moment Potter gave up his experiment, the sergeant planted his feet firmly and jerked the rope through its apex by both hands. As his colleague secured it once more, Potter swung back and forth, raised off the floor. His arms strained as his feet scrabbled for support. Finally the tips of his bare toes found a tenuous grip and he steadied himself as best he could.

Potter was fully awake now, and following close behind action came his force of will. 

"Where's Mrs Peck?" he demanded, his gaze darting over the several figures in the room, with their blurred insignia of Muggle Advisory and military. "Where's Malfoy? Who's in charge?"

Although the room was busy with guards, the only officials present were those whose attendance was unavoidable. Emma Peck stepped forward, holding, as Lucius had rarely seen her do, her wand.

"Harry. You've left us with no choice. The attacks on Avalon Towers are becoming more violent with every day. You know who's responsible. You won't be allowed to protect your friends any longer."

"They're not my friends." The strain showed in the speedy denial that replaced his previous silence, and in the slight rise in his pitch. "I don't know who's doing it."

"All you need to do is give us their names, Harry. Give us a few details about their activities. That's all we need, and then you'll have your trial. We all want this to be over. We want to put an end to all this conflict, all this destruction. But if you won't help us do that, Harry, I'm afraid we'll have to persuade you."

His lip turned. " _Persuade_ me? Call it what it is, why don't-"

A practised fist struck him from behind. 

"We're not here to listen to your opinions," the sergeant said in a tone of absurd reason. "Unless you have answers to give, you'll keep your mouth shut." 

Potter strained to get the air back into his lungs in his contorted position. His toes searched out their lost grip. 

But his jaw was set unshakably. "I've got no answers to give. So why don't you fucking get on with it."

"Harry-"

"I said get on with it."

The sergeant bent his arm as if to strike him again, but the blow did not fall. Instead, he bent down to reach behind the black box that held their equipment. He returned holding the hilt of an iron bar, a little thicker than a man's thumb.

Potter swallowed hard when he saw it and stared, unable to drag his gaze away. His mind would be making the same comparison as everybody else, between the unrelenting hardness of the bar and the bare, clammy flesh of his torso, which looked awfully vulnerable and human. 

"One name, Harry. Name one of the saboteurs."

This time, Potter said nothing. 

The sergeant laid the bar down in plain view and made a show of rolling back his cuffs. 

"Longbottom? McLaggen?" Emma Peck persisted. As the sergeant circled behind him, the muscles up his spine stiffened. "Did Dumbledore know about it?"

Potter wound his fingers around the rope above him and braced himself as the sergeant came back into view. 

"Harry? Did Dumbledore-"

"Go on," the prisoner said softly, lip flicking into a curl. "Tell them to start. Say the word."

The sergeant understood what Potter was doing, even if Emma Peck did not. Wordlessly, he moved forward, throwing all his weight and trained momentum behind his fist. It buried itself in Potter's stomach and thrust him back, and after that Potter simply swung, back and forth, the soft creak of the rope audible as he gaped, fighting the sudden suffocating pain. 

"Tell me when you're ready to co-operate," said the sergeant and moved in for another round.

Potter was ready for the first blow this time, abdominals tensed to resist it, but the second and third and fourth and fifth blows battered his defences away. Lucius's stomach spasmed in sympathy. Once or twice he had to turn his head, because a treacherous, primitive instinct told him to throw himself to Potter's defence, and only the coldest good sense kept him still. He slipped around in front of the gallery, as close as he dared, where there was a better view of Potter's jerking body. His chest was drawn in so tight that his lower ribs looked like bone laid over skin. 

When the assault eased up, Emma Peck left him a meagre few moments to compose himself. "Make this easy for me, Harry, so I can make it easy for you. Here's a simple question. How long have you known Margot Harrington-Blotts?"

The pause Potter left suggested a struggle to master the necessary muscles, rather than any real change of heart.

"Put me in front of the Wizengamot and I'll answer any ques-"

The sergeant struck him from the side this time. His aim was good. Potter's knees curled up in slow motion towards his stomach as if to ease the pain, then collapsed back down for the necessary support of his toes on the floor. After a very long pause, he went on.

"-any questions you have. Give me a trial before the-"

The next punch fell even harder. He swung for a good long while this time before he could make his legs stretch down to bear his weight again. As the sergeant turned away, Lucius thought he caught in his face the ignominy of striking a helpless man.

Potter said nothing after that. Not as the soft questions continued – Neville Longbottom, Zacharias Smith, Dumbledore, Cartwright, Lovegood, Harrington-Blotts – all easy answers. Not as they moved on from their fists and wielded the iron bar. He watched it as it fell for the first time, dumbly, as if unable to accept the reality of it until, with a sickeningly muffled sound, it struck the front of his thighs. 

The blows rained down hard and fast, no moment of respite between them. The front of his thighs, the back of his calves– the only place where the sergeant pulled a little of the ferocity from his arm was on Potter's flanks and ribs, because presumably the threadbare ethics of this approach still drew a line at murder. Potter twisted and jerked under the thump of the iron bar as though in the throes of a seizure, his body so desperate to reduce the pain that the impossibility of escape meant nothing. The assault slowed then. The sergeant fell into a technique, Lucius observed, of lengthening the interval between his blows, so that each one appeared to be the last, so that relief was constantly offered and denied. By the time the dreadful sound of beaten flesh and half-swallowed groans had ended, Potter was dangling from his bindings with his limp legs unable to reach the ground. The sergeant's panting made a disturbing rhythm with Potter's tight-throated wheeze. 

"Harry," said Emma Peck in a soft voice that Lucius thought, chillingly, she would one day use to her children. "Help us bring this to an end. How long have you known Neville Longbottom?"

When Potter slowly opened his eyes, they appeared brighter than ever in his flushed skin with its wild shading of bristle. 

"Fuck you," he said with what strength he had left. "He's got nothing to do with it. I want the Wizengamot."

His toes found the floor again and bore him up.

Lucius, who had seen the worst of Tom's excesses, wiped his palms, one by one, on the sleeves of his robe. He inched forward again, angling around the obstacle of the sergeant.

"We've barely begun, Harry. You'll tell us everything in the end, you'll have no choice. Come on. Make it easier on yourself. Help us."

Potter was adept, when the stakes were mortal, at measuring himself and the obstacles against him with precision. It was what had helped him prevail over Tom. He did not believe himself to be invincible, and right now the knowledge was clear on his face: eventually, pain would break his will. But as Lucius had hoped, the application of force simply made him all the more determined to resist until his body betrayed him. "Get me in front of the Wizengamot. Then I'll answer your questions."

"Auror Dawlish." 

Ah. Lucius had wondered whether she would have the character to cast the Cruciatus herself – her obsessive sense of duty was hardly sufficient to fuel the darkest of curses – and here was his answer. Flanked by one of the younger Aurors, Dawlish moved forward until his hands met Potter's stomach. With a coarse touch, they skimmed his torso, familiarising themselves as his eyes could not with his target. Lucius disciplined himself to stay still. 

Potter's lips drew back at the pressure on the damaged muscle over his ribs and the bleeding wound under his left arm. "This is what you call Auror work now, is it?"

Dawlish dug his fingers in and Potter's kicked at him furiously, his bare feet making no impact.

If the contact had bothered Potter, the subsequent silence made left him visibly twitchy as Dawlish stepped back and he waited to find out what was in store for him. The tension made the whole room still – the wizards with a sense of dread and the Muggles with an eager sort of curiosity. Lucius wiped his palm again to hold the device securely in his fingers, concealed as best it could be in the folds of his robe. He steeled himself. Brutality was one thing – it had brought out the fight in Potter – but pain with no prospect of relief might be what broke him. 

Intent and efficient, Dawlish cast his curse. _"Crucio."_

For an instant, there was no result in Potter's perfectly still body. Then he began to writhe. Soundlessly, his limbs twisted into a straining knot of muscle, wrenching one way then the other in search of relief which would not come. His lips parted in a grimace, silent since his chest was too tight for air. Lucius allowed himself the release of grinding his teeth. The comparison was close to unbearable. Only he had seen what Potter looked like wracked with pleasure, his ankles splayed over his shoulders and all trace of vanity abandoned as he opened himself up for more. 

Dawlish kept him under for a minute or more as first the Muggles, then his assistant, then Emma Peck herself began to shift uncomfortably. 

Emma Peck cleared her throat once it was done. "Harry," she said to the panting, coughing, trembling wreck he had become. 

He quelled the shuddering in his face long enough to spit on the floor. The remainder of his answer dribbled from his bottom lip, tinged red and dripping onto his chest. 

Dawlish's wand flicked out again and, unprepared, Lucius slammed his eyes closed. But that would not do. He forced them open to watch the ordeal. Potter's resistance was weakening. Brief murmurs of despair were starting to force their way between his lips. It was not enough. And yet Lucius's fingers itched towards his wand and clamoured for the salvation he knew he could bring. He shifted the little telephone into his left hand and laid the other over his wand, and then he eased his way into Potter's mind.

"No." 

Potter mumbled his resistance, recognising the culprit instantly as his head swung up and searched the room to find Lucius among the blurred figures. Lucius pressed harder, fighting down the echo of Potter's pain that surged down his own nerves, pushed his way past the panic and entreaty to get deeper into Potter's mind. He found a memory. Lucius in Potter's bed, asleep, his bare shoulders protruding from the sheets and his hair loose on the pillow. Lucius seized the memory with his mind as he might have done with his fist and, finally, Potter howled.

"No!" he cried, weakly, with the Cruciatus still pouring like boiling oil down his veins. "You- No, no!"

Another memory – Potter backed against one of the Manor's bookshelves with Lucius's hand in the opening of his trousers and Lucius's mouth on his neck. He ploughed his mind into that one too, fixing on the texture of ancient books rubbing against Potter's back and Potter's rapturous expression. Mouth straining open, Potter let a full roar out of his throat and his head whipped side-to-side as if it were the only way to diffuse the pain. He thrashed in his bindings, all restraint forgotten, as he gave himself up to helpless noise. 

A stirring in his groin that was a small part arousal and a very large part distress, Lucius kept a stranglehold on Draco's spell-modified telephone and manipulated its buttons again and again, capturing and sending, capturing and sending, as Potter twisted himself into the perfect visual embodiment of agony. 

Dawlish only stopped when Emma Peck stepped forward to nudge his wand arm. She wet her lips.

"You were at school with Neville Longbottom, weren't you?' Her voice was firm but uninflected, as if this witnessing had drained a little more of the humanity out of her. "Harry, what's the harm in answering that? Just nod. That's a start. You were at school with him. Yes or no." 

Potter turned his face back down to the ground and said nothing, hanging from arms and hands long gone numb. A sweat bead rolled down his drenched forehead and bled into the outside corner of his eye. The only movement was the shallow rasp of his breath. 

"Then we have to go further." 

At her nod, the two soldiers began deftly to unpack their carton. They took out of it a machine, cauldron sized, sitting loosely in a thick black plastic box. They laid it on the ground behind Potter. A Muggle obscenity regardless of its purpose, it sat like a nightmare creature born of dark spellwork, all metal panels and tentacle wires, black casing and that hideous plastic stink. 

Despite himself, Potter watched. He trembled when he saw the electrodes lifted out of the carton; with his control exhausted, his reaction played itself out over his whole body. Then his gaze searched the crowd again, and even with the spell-link between them lapsed, his object and his question were clear. Lucius could, however, stand by and watch this happen. It was necessary. Unthinking, his hand reached out for a pole on the seating bank beside him, holding him up. 

In his other hand, the telephone worked furiously as they attached the clips to all the most vulnerable places on Potter's body. When they hitched the rope two inches higher so they could target his toes as well, he dangled with all the resistance of empty rags and Lucius captured that too. He concentrated hard on the combination of buttons under his fingers. It kept at bay the revulsion that threatened to overwhelm his discipline. These inferior creatures with their ignorant lives hadn't the slightest idea what Potter was, what he had accomplished, or what extraordinary qualities he possessed. To them, he was nothing more than a set of pliable nerves. And their machine was going to inflict its coarse punishment on him – with its power that was so much less subtle and magnificent than the magic in Potter's own body. It was nothing short of defilement. But he would stand by and watch it. 

Emma Peck retreated a few steps and lost her train of interrogation. With a flicked switch, the machine hummed into life.

They all looked up as the door opened. A trainee enforcer from the Muggle Advisory Office stood in the doorway, rooted in horror at the sight of the prisoner dangling metres away from him, black wires crawling over his body as they disappeared under the waistband of the white trousers. 

"Yes?" snapped Emma Peck, spell broken, beckoning him over. 

The urgency in his voice carried his confidential message more widely than intended. "There's a disturbance on level eight. The Atrium. We can't be sure what's happened but it looks pretty messy and the lift is out of commission. Probably some stunt from the protesters. We'll find out more as soon as we can get somebody with authority to open the stairwell and get up there."

Lucius stepped up to the visitor and the prisoner, slipping the telephone back into his robe. "By all means, you have the authority. Open the stairwell at once and find out what's causing the disturbance. The password is mandragora. Report back here the instant you have information."

Emma Peck – scrupulous, obedient and ignorant of the passwords that were known only to a very close circle of ministerial advisers – gave him a resentful nod. "Do it."

Before the courtroom door had fully closed, Lucius pressed on briskly. "I fear this must put an end to our enquiries here. All hands will be needed to see to the disturbance. Now if you would kindly-"

"Just a minute-" Emma Peck said. 

At the same, Dawlish said, "Begin."

There must have been a hint of a spell behind his command, because the lieutenant bent down and flicked a new switch on the machine. The charge flowed instantaneously. 

Lucius raised his wand to strike but the effect of magic on a powerful current was unpredictable. Potter's body arched in pain, stretched taut and thin down to the very bones of his fingers, and his jaw flung open. Far from screaming, he could barely even draw breath; his eyes were more white than iris. He could think of nothing else to do. He laid one hand over his wand and the other over Potter's chest and as skin made contact with skin he spoke the strongest protective charm he could think of. 

It eased the agony of untrammelled power sizzling down his arm and into his body and it gave him the strength to bear it. Potter's heart thumped under his palm as the force of it drew them together in the same pain, skin glued to skin, as his lips chanted the spell over, insufficient to defeat the electrical charge but enough to keep them both from irreparable damage. Lucius's vision smudged all around the edges, the rows of seats in front of him curving like ribbons. His throat would not open for breath. His nerves held nothing but pain, muscles knotted, veins on fire. The pain and the struggle went on and on. 

"Malfoy, what are you doing?" came a voice like distant bird chatter.

"What's going on?" Dawlish demanded, as the lieutenant, with a shake of his head, flicked the switch back again. Potter's body sagged. 

"Stop it!" The door slammed open before the same Muggle Advisory trainee, breathless with his boots skidding across the floor. "What you're doing to Potter – stop it! There's pictures. It's driving them crazy."

Emma Peck strode up to meet him. "What's happened?"

The young man reeked of haste and nervous sweat, hands clenching and unclenching in a faster beat than his breath. "There's pictures of Potter. People say they've seen them – they know what you're doing. The people in the Atrium heard about it, the electronics shop or someone said the Leaky, they're showing the pictures. The crowd, they've gone crazy. They're smashing everything, we've had to disable the lift but they're looking for a way down and there's more of them out in the street, hundreds and hundreds. And the Wizengamot too – they've left the chamber and I saw Mr Weasley hexing a man. Someone saw Death Eaters too. The stairwell's full of Aurors trying to keep them out but the Enforcement level is cut off. It's all about Potter. You have to stop. Okay? You have to stop."

Oh, this was so much more than Lucius had hoped for. 

"We press on," Dawlish said. "The chaos will only get worse if we give in."

Lucius laid a hand on the young man's forearm and managed a hoarse semblance of speech. "You've done well. I want you to go back and find the most senior Auror you can see. I want them to get the stairway clear – it will be a bloodbath if there's any fighting there. Block it at level nine and get a team of Aurors underneath to hold the line – it is imperative that we keep intruders out the Department of Mysteries at any cost. Keep the lift out of commission." He indicated the full contingent of Emma Peck's staff and Dawlish's Auror assistant. "Go with him and do what you can. The building's security comes first." 

"Don't listen to the Death Eater. Stay here."

"Come now, Dawlish. Potter can barely lift his head. With three wands and two firearms between us, I believe we can keep him under control." A crash came from above them. "Don't delay."

On one side of the door was this cowardly scene of torture; on the other, the possibility of redemptive action. Over Dawlish's renewed objections, they left. 

"We'll move him back into the cell," said Emma Peck with a nod at Potter's faintly struggling form. "Before there are any more – _pictures_."

Lucius glanced at the soldiers. "If I could beg a word."

She approached him with the day's growing tension breaking out in the snap of her lips. "How the bloody hell is that possible? We're ten storeys underground. Even if there's some sort of hidden camera, there's no cables, no way to get a signal out."

"Muggle technology improved with magic," Lucius said, very low, as he casually drew his wand. "My son is quite inventive. _Obliviate._ "

The spell, though softly spoken, sizzled with the full force of his angry magic. She blinked, eyes vacant, clutching at the remaining shreds of her mind. 

He pushed her gently towards the gallery. "Sit down, Emma. Have a rest. You've earned it." Stripped of her usual intransigence, she stumbled where his will directed her.

"Malfoy!" Dawlish spun towards his voice, suspicious and afraid. 

A simple banishing charm sliced the air. Auror Dawlish struck the far wall at speed and crumpled, his wand still spinning on the floor where it had fallen.

"Is that necessary?" He turned to the sergeant's raised gun, lowering his wand. "I mean you no harm. In fact, compared to the mob of furious wizards descending the stairs outside, you might think of me as a friend."

The younger soldier drew as well. "Put that wand down."

Lucius continued. "Since your most recent orders appear to have been superseded by unforeseen circumstances, I suggest that you make your escape before the mob arrives. Otherwise I can demonstrate wandless magic, which is an expression that no doubt will have piqued your curiosity." He left a half-second pause. "No? Then help me."

The walls around them rumbled with the force of an unseen spell far above. 

"Release the ropes and take the prisoner down," Lucius commanded, bending on one knee to strip off the electrodes, toes first. As he grasped Potter's calves, one by one, to steady them, the muscle flexed in the first signs of consciousness. A brush of his fingertips erased the livid red scars where the metal teeth had made contact; a second spell made him clean and gave him back his dignity. The onyx suppressors made Lucius's bones ache as he removed them and cast them away.

With the aid of the young lieutenant, he navigated Potter onto the floor, where the barest hint of a levitating spell enabled Lucius to support his weight. Hovering on the fringes of consciousness, Potter seemed to be doing his best to stand unaided. The sergeant, who with utmost efficiency had packed his ugly implements back into their carton, must have observed something too familiar, too easy in the proximity of their bodies. He stood suddenly. "Put him back in the cell." 

Lucius was neither so confident nor so desperate as to resort to Unforgivables yet, but as the walls gave a longer, deeper vibration that dislodged a shower of ceiling plaster, the point was fast approaching. "The safe custody of the prisoner is Ministry business," he replied. "Your task was the extraction of information, no more. Unless you believe that the wizards who commissioned it are going to come down here and defend you, I suggest you leave while you still can."

"Put him back in the cell."

Reaching out with the first exploratory tendrils of the Imperius, he found the sergeant's mind closed and instinctively resistant. The lieutenant was easier prey. How effortless to manipulate a mind when the brutal boot of the military had already schooled it into obedience. "Take out your firearm and put it in your mouth." 

"Lieutenant, give me your weapon. That's an order."

"Very good. Now pull the trigger."

"Give me your weapon."

The young man's hand shook, self-preservation battling against the unfathomable compulsion, and he screwed his eyes closed. Potter struggled in Lucius's grasp, responding half-consciously to the sounds of conflict and distress. 

"Go on, boy. Pull the-"

Evidently soldiers received some training in distinguishing winnable from unwinnable battles, because the sergeant sheathed his own weapon and raised his hand in a gesture of surrender. "Let him go."

Lucius shot an irritated glance at the door, which swung open, and did as requested. Between them, the shaking young man and the resentful sergeant picked up the carton and retreated into the corridor. 

"Farewell, Emma," Lucius nodded to the solitary figure turning her wand over and over in her hand like a curious rock as he took a firm grip around Potter's waist and eased him toward the door. 

"Come on," he said impatiently, propping his groggy charge against the corridor wall as the soldiers rounded a corner and disappeared from view. The stairs were a long way off and his magic was weak from the assault of electricity. He shook Potter's lolling head by the chin. "Master yourself and help me. You are surrounded by enemies still, and we have several floors of obstacles to pass through – speed is imperative and that means you must carry your own weight." 

Those distinctive eyes snapped open, fully conscious. Potter shoved him in the middle of the chest and ran. Weak and still bound at the wrists, he stumbled towards the stairs, shoulders glancing off the walls.

He did not get far before Lucius, with a combination of angry speed and spellwork, caught him, but Potter would not concede. His wand may be in Azkaban still, beyond the reach even of Lucius's influence, but his magic was as deep and instinctive as ever. When Lucius tried to drag him, he became stone-heavy; his skin turned slippery as a fish when grasped; he fought Lucius every step.

"Get away from me! I said get your-"

Lucius shoved him bodily against the wall, immobilising him with a forearm across his neck and fighting through his repelling magic. Potter snarled, faint and low in his throat. There was no time for any of this. 

"Harry." He gentled his grip very slightly. "Harry, don't fight me." Potter blinked, his pupils still slightly shrunken with the narcotic after-effects of pain. "I have made a point of promising you nothing. You know it. This is my first promise to you, Harry. Be led by me now and I will see you safe and free if I can."

Potter blinked very heavily, as if slipping into unconsciousness again. A flash of light came down the stairwell, desperate shouting and footsteps behind it. "And you have no choice. Come on."

Potter stumbled with him as he slipped into the dark shadow of the staircase, just as two sets of boots rounded the landing and descended. Cloaked and armed, they moved rapidly. One figure was Lestrange, the other unrecognisable under a fading disillusionment charm. They did not speak, but their purpose was unmistakable; there was nothing of note on this floor except Potter and the strategic power that control over him would bring.

Lowering his tiring charge to the ground, Lucius sent out a summoning spell and crouched down beside him. 

"There is no time for argument." When he shrugged off his cloak and wound it around Potter's shoulders, the transmitted body heat seemed to do him as much good as the insulating fur cuff around the hood. His head swayed less. Lucius lent him the support of an invigorating charm; the rest he would have to accomplish by himself. "For once, do exactly as I say. You have no way of distinguishing friend from foe and there are all too many people whose path would be smoothed by your elimination." 

Vanishing the last ropes, he drew out from his robes the spare pair of glasses and settled them on Potter's face, and that more than anything seemed to restore him. His eyes lost their dazed look and came hard into focus. His hand caught Lucius's withdrawing wrist. "I want another promise from you," Potter said. "You get me outside and then I go my own way. For good."

There was no malice in his grip. He held Lucius close only to study him better. Evidently his judgment was acute enough to know that Lucius's principles did not stoop to idle cruelty. But he clearly could not contemplate how those principles might be served by the suffering that had just been inflicted on him. His bafflement was no surprise. It was part of his appeal that he had no idea of his power to inspire. 

"Very well," Lucius said. "If that is your wish."

He jerked free and seized the staff as it darted down the staircase. When he unwound the black velvet binding, the raven's head was already snapping furiously at the shock of being summoned through a thick office door and whatever other obstacles it had met on the way down. He planted it on the floor between Potter's feet. 

"Take this," he said. Potter's refusal to be ordered battled with his refusal to show fear, but he wrapped his hand around the middle of its shaft. "The method you have been searching for," Lucius continued, "is no more than unshakable will. Like any magical beast, this one bends to a superior power."

Behind the ashen cheeks, Potter's face was grim, but a spark had come back into it, born of his unquenchable awe of magic. Lucius released the staff. Its iron head lunged immediately towards Potter's forehead, beak gnashing, but Potter made no attempt to protect himself. He merely stared it down, with his fingernails digging into the wood and the points of his teeth bared. 

Potter hissed – _"Petrificus!"_

The feeble spell was powerless against a magical object; it was the surge of wandless magic that tamed the bird to obedience. And although the effort had left Potter's split lips bleeding again, the staff fixed him with a wary glare, apparently calling a truce until the true issue of mastery could be decided. 

From back along the corridor came the sound of doors opening and slamming as the Death Eaters checked the empty courtrooms, slowly approaching. He pulled Potter to his feet and between his support and the staff, they began to climb the stairs. 

At the ninth floor landing, the air was sulphurous and shimmering from the hostilities going on half a flight higher, where what sounded like a small contingent of Aurors was holding the staircase against the crowds.

"Bring him out," a man's voice was shouting over the spellwork. "Or we'll come in and get him." 

Lucius pulled the hood of his cloak over Potter's face and turned down the corridor that led to the Department of Mysteries and the single lift shaft that exited the lower levels. It was deserted, the Department's few inhabitants had either left to join the fray or remained obliviously sheltered behind the building's strongest protective wards. 

He heard with dread the whir of the lift descending. Only a select few had the power to take the lifts out of suspension – a handful of senior Ministers and one or two indispensable advisers – and they were the very people he least cared to meet right now. The rumbling grew closer. 

Behind them stood the door to the Department of Mysteries, whose password Luicus had not needed to court suspicion by seeking. 

_"Alohomora!"_ The heavily warded door did not move. He drew his wand and hit it harder, but the black metal locks held firm. Closing his eyes on an indrawn breath, he forced himself to rise above the danger and the urgency, he focused his mind on his goal and concentrated every scrap of magic in him into the tendons of his right hand, building the power until his bones felt like clashing icebergs. When his arm whipped out, his banishing spell hurled into the door's side and flung it open, tearing a ragged portion of frame with it. It thundered back against the wall, top hinge torn loose and the lower one barely holding. Inside, the first handle he tried opened without resistance and he shoved Potter into a long room whose glass cages housed drifting black shadows. 

"What are you doing?" Potter leaned against the wall, dragging himself up straight. Released from helpless confinement, his deep instinct for survival was rebounding now and, around it, he was pulling himself together. 

"Keeping my promise." 

Lucius shut the door between them. He did not trust Potter's good sense to hold him back from danger, but a man who had spent the best part of the afternoon under torture should not be capable of much. Outside, the lift halted. His wand arm, drained by the banishing spell, lacked the strength to repair the damage he had done to the outer door. He pulled it closed behind him and hurried towards the staircase. 

As the lift slid open, he doubled back just in time to see Julian striding out of it with a squad of soldiers in his wake. 

"This way," Lucius called, drawing their attention away from the wreckage. "The staircase leads down to the courtrooms."

The young man strode at the front of the group, unarmed and heading for the catacombs of the Ministry of Magic, as if the authority of his reinsurers' billions placed him beyond harm's reach. Lucius had never seen a sense of physical urgency on him before, and once again he was struck by faint regret that he could not have been bred with a little magic and a belief in something larger than his own advancement. Lucius did not need to look at the soldiers to know they would be young and blank-faced and highly strung. The rifles slung over their backs or clasped in hand made him sick to the stomach with the thought of metal lumps tearing through vital organs.

"You met with trouble upstairs?" he enquired.

"Chaos. Rioting on every level except the top. Malfoy, what are you playing at?"

Lucius nodded toward the empty lift. "I am endeavouring to reach the Minister."

"He's not in his office," Julian reported. "Missing in action."

As they stopped, the soldiers spread out around Lucius, too wide to keep them all in his peripheral vision. "How could he go missing surrounded by a small army of advisers?"

Julian gave him a cold smile. "A very good question. One of the soldiers saw him step into a storage closet. He never came out again. He was holding a silver pocket watch, Malfoy. The same one, I assume, that sat on his desk yesterday – the one he told me was just a souvenir you'd given him." 

Though he had plotted his way into an influential position that rarely stretched him to having to fight his corner, Lucius had known that, back-against-the-wall, Julian would be merciless. His unwavering eye for the undercurrents of power put him out of reach of all the egotistical hooks and lures Lucius might otherwise have wielded. And now the incontrovertible will he expressed in the boardroom had found a new outlet as the soldiers, separated from their commanders, deferred to his leadership as the sole source of authority in a treacherous world. Julian's lips curled very slightly. "Arrest him. Take his wand and break it. Bring him down to the courtroom and don't let him out of your sight."

To give him credit, Julian's arrogance was not incapable of learning. "One hint of your mind games, Malfoy, and I'll have them shoot." He did not turn his back as two of the soldiers restrained Lucius's arms while a third slipped the wand from his hand, balanced its tip at a diagonal to the wall and raised his foot. 

This much magic Lucius could manage. With a whispered word, the wand flew metres back along the corridor. Julian nodded. A rifle butt struck Lucius in the kidney and brought him to his knees. 

"I understood," Lucius forced out, coughing, "that even Muggles had rules regarding the treatment of prisoners." 

A male voice from behind him said, "Civilian rights? You're still armed and hostile, even without a weapon."

Julian smirked down at him. With his waxed hair ruffled and his shirt untucked, he might have been playing out some boyhood fantasy, except that Lucius recognised his sense of morality and understood that, if it could be done without consequences, the young man would dispose of him. Between them lay the knowledge that no science could test whether Lucius had been mouthing a lethal spell at the time he was shot down. 

"Go and get his wand," Julian said softly, "and break it. If he tries that again, break his arm first. Don't shoot him until he resists."

The soldier froze on his first step. Outside the wrecked door, Potter stood, Lucius's wand raised, leaning on the staff in his left hand. His lips didn't even move. Lucius had only a moment to wonder how long Potter was capable of standing upright before the flood of blackness swept through his own body and he fell down. 

His mind ascended from inky depths to the awareness of Potter on hands and knees beside him, shaking the front of his robe. Tentatively Lucius raised a hand to the wound on the back of his head.

"You deserved that," Potter said as he sagged a little onto Lucius's chest. 

Struggling up onto his elbows, Lucius observed the unconscious forms around him, soldiers puddled on the ground or slumped against the wall. Julian's face had fallen near enough, he discovered, for his boot to reach. 

He stretched his legs, finding no damage, and ran his hands over his eyes. "What did you do?"

Whatever it was had clearly exhausted Potter, who snatched a few shallow breaths before he could raise his head to respond. "St- stunning spell," he replied eventually. "With a twist. I never ... never did find the spell for the Spiderweb Imperius, but ... the principle-"

Lucius looked at him sharply. "When did you practise that?"

"Just then," Potter gasped and wilted. 

Catching him, Lucius felt the damp patch in the cloak behind his arm, and beneath that he searched out the wound that had reopened. He clutched his palm over the split flesh and held it there as the blood seeped between his fingers. Potter sighed into the strongest healing charm he could muster, his forehead seeking out Lucius's shoulder for support. The last two ribs would need a lot of work later, but for now he should be able at least to get up again. 

He reached for his wand. Potter's hand, holding it tight, jerked away from him, and the rest of him followed.

"Tell me why I should let you have it back." 

One of the soldiers rolled her head, stirring. Whatever it took, Lucius did not intend to meet his end in this place. "Inside and outside this building, the witches and wizards of Britain are rioting in your support. Their scrutiny will keep you safe once you are among them, but now is not the time for debate. Once you have reached safety, you may ask me any questions you wish."

"Another promise, Lucius?" Potter asked wearily.

He held out his hand for his wand. "I promise only that you may ask."

Potter laughed, the edges of his teeth still dark with blood. 

The catch of a rifle clicked.

 _"Stupefy!"_ said their two voices at once. 

The soldier collapsed again. Lucius grasped his wand and steadied Potter as he rose, re-fastening the cloak at this throat. The lift opened at a touch to admit them. 

Despite Lucius's best efforts, the doors opened at the next level. Through the smoke and shouting that filled the Atrium, he glimpsed flashes of spellwork – a great burst of fire, a cavern of shattered masonry where a lift had been destroyed to gain entry to the shaft above. Splitting the whole floor was an ash-streaked stream of molten gold that could only have come from the very gates of the Ministry. Even in his limited field of vision, dozens of figures were discernible, and by the sound of their voices, many more filled the Atrium behind them, hundreds of them and Potter's name on their lips. 

The haze of clashing magic turned the wizards into misty wraiths, but in front of him, the austere height of Margot Harrington-Blotts stood out. Tiberius Ogden and the eldest Weasley child fought side by side, firing spells into the blind distance; he caught the strained voice of Minerva McGonagall, and the huge shape blocking most of what remained of the gateway had to be Hogwarts' giant. 

He blocked Potter's step forward with his shoulder. 

"Not here. You'll be cut down by a friend without either of you knowing it." Smoke drifted in through the doors which hung obstinately open as Lucius stabbed the button with his wand.

A flash of red, a throb of close-passing magic in his eardrums, and the lift wall's mahogany panelling warped as if a century of sunlight had been condensed into a second. Raising a protective hand to his jaw which prickled at the near miss, he didn't see the second spell. He simply felt the flare of power as Potter's staff swung into the spell's path and swallowed it whole. The raven's head sparkled with glints of magic running all over its surface, wiped temporarily clean of the black grit of age. 

"Okay," Potter said. The doors clanked closed. 

As they ascended one storey higher, the sounds of conflict faded under the slow slither of the lift in its shaft. Potter leaned his head back against the wall, letting the staff hang loose in his fingers. His open-pored, sweat-slicked skin distracted Lucius with the idle thought of making him clean. Beneath the soiled skin, however, the contours of his chest were as solid as ever, and it was his living flesh that drew the eye. The coarse prison trousers and Lucius's cloak seemed illusory next to the enduring strength and youth of his body. All his self-effacing habits disguised it, but at his core Potter was hard. He did not mould himself to events but made them flow around him, and even if Lucius had taught him a whole new language, the sentiments he expressed with it were still his own. He was young enough that the peaks and crooks of his collar-bone looked as smooth as the inside of an oyster shell, but in his hands he held a weapon that had been built for a king. 

"You could not have borne yourself better," Lucius told him, expressing a small fraction of the pride he felt. "I've never seen a starker display of courage."

"Courage!" Spittle flew and Potter snarled. "Courage – I had my fucking hands tied to the ceiling! It's not like I was there by choice."

The lift snagged, hitched, and slowed. Lucius kept his full attention on Potter. "You had choices. You made them well."

Mouth open, ready as a gun muzzle, but paralysed with visible conflict, Potter stared at him. The staff, Lucius recalled suddenly, was a killing weapon. But deep in Potter's eyes was something astonishingly vulnerable: a plea. 

"How-" Over the top of that crucial word, the lift screeched to a complete stop. Something heavy hit the roof with a thud. 

They were six floors short of the Ministerial level and the secured Floo points which could return them to the streets above. The last thing they could afford was to stay still. Lucius wrenched open the doors and dragged himself up through the waist-high gap onto the seventh floor. 

The damage to the Department of Games and Sport was minor, he assumed, compared to what must have been done to Muggle Advisory, two levels up and the ultimate cause of Potter's arrest and torture. With any luck it would be flattened by now, along with Lucius's makeshift office. 

"Quickly," he said as he helped Potter to his feet. 

Potter kept a fair pace for a man with his injuries, leaning less and less often on the staff which appeared to provide more than just physical support. The mob had moved on from this level, leaving behind shattered doors, broken glass and smouldering rubbish bins. They passed no-one in the smoky corridors as Lucius led them towards the far corner of the floor – fortunate since, even with the black trim of the hood obscuring his brow, Potter was already regaining his distinctive purposeful stride.

"Wait," Potter said when they reached the corridor that came to a dead end outside the old Patents Office.

Reluctantly, Lucius stopped. The metallic chill of Potter's staff touched the side of his neck. The lights on the walls sputtered and spent magic vibrated up from the floor below, making his trouser cuffs cling to his calves.

"I hope this isn't one of your tricks," Potter said, close behind him. "For your sake, I hope it isn't."

The youthful impulse in Lucius, that Potter himself had fanned back to full vigour, wondered which of them would win an open fight. He turned to face Potter, keeping the weapon against his jugular. He avoided any appeal to such lazy emotions as trust. Behind Potter, the smoke thickened and rose; a gust like a fist darted out and dispersed. 

"Do you think I mean to harm you?"

"One way of looking at it, you already have." He spoke, to Lucius's immense satisfaction, from intellect, not emotion. "You could have stopped what they did to me. If you'd wanted."

"Would you prefer I had used somebody else's suffering to make my point? Longbottom's perhaps."

Potter tilted his head, as if a clear view of Lucius's mind were only a question of angle.

"Nobody but you could have roused them like this, Harry. And do you think for a moment you could have played the part convincingly, if you had known everything I planned?" The raven's bladed beak stung his throat. "You may give in to your wounded emotions and judge me the most despicable sort of traitor. But I'm not your enemy. It will never be that simple."

He had known that the betrayal of trust would strike deeper than the physical pain. In another time, he might have taken Potter to bed and convinced him with the slow attentions of his hands. Instead, he could only watch the grimy lines in Potter's face deepen and twist as seconds passed and the opportunity slipped away from them. The razor edge, finally, eased away from his neck. 

"I always knew what you were. I never really hoped you'd change." His protégé swung the staff back to his side. 

"I've given you no cause-"

The silent spell struck Potter from behind, slicing his arm open so that the staff clattered to the ground. Lucius's hex hurled too late down the corridor. The staff was already swooping away from them, into the thickening smoke, summoned into an unseen pair of waiting hands.

 _"Protego!"_ As the lights gave another dying flicker, he put himself in front of Potter's kneeling form and fended off spells for severing, for suffocating, for blinding. Dark spells that Lucius knew all too well. There were two men, or three, concealed somewhere around the last bend in the corridor. As he peered into the smoke, a cry and a metallic clatter disclosed the staff's location. 

_"Crucio!"_

_"Confrigo!"_

Lestrange. Rowle. A younger voice – one of the Bulstrode nephews perhaps. It must have been the staff that had drawn them. Probably the most powerful magical object in the building, and certainly the darkest, it would have left a magical residue that could be traced by someone whose senses were attuned to these things.

He blocked another barrage of spells. A glance behind him confirmed that Potter, for once, was keeping out of harm's way, leaning against the wall and binding his bleeding arm in the folds of the cloak.

"A little desperate of you to come here," Lucius called, casting a hex that brought down a shower of ceiling plaster in a temporary veil. "How many of the angry wizards in this building have lost someone at the end of one of your wands? The Ministry's demise demands your personal witness, I suppose."

It was unlikely that they would be content with the unexpected booty of the staff, even if they guessed exactly what it was. The Death Eaters had a sense for crisis and instability –it was the environment in which they had always thrived. And here Lucius had handed them the perfect opportunity to exploit it. 

"Fudge is finished already." Lestrange's voice strained in the smoke. "I'm more interested in who you've got. And why." 

A chill seized Lucius's spine. He had made this carefully crafted chaos to be controlled by his hand, no other, to be created and crushed too swiftly for intervention. He had not considered the use that others might make of it. 

"Give us the boy, Lucius. Do that and you can walk away – we'll settle the rest of it another day, you and me. Call it a sign of good faith."

Potter was the sole antidote to the plague he had let loose. Only the sight of him would calm the mob. Without him, there would be no natural end to their anger, and no heart to drive his new regime. He had no illusions – if he let Potter fall into the Death Eaters' hands, nothing short of miraculous good fortune would retrieve him alive. Everything would be lost, and under the cloak of anarchy, Lestrange would wreak destruction as only he could do. Lestrange who was little more than an animal with a wand arm. Lestrange who had blundered up the ranks of Tom's haphazard troops with no more remarkable talent than an insatiable appetite for cruelty. 

"Give me the staff, Rabastan. You know I won't walk away empty handed."

"The boy, Lucius."

To have foundered on such an elementary rock drove him to fury. At the beast Lestrange, but mostly at his unforgivable hubris. He had fancied himself a king-maker and instead he had paved the way for a tyrant. To say nothing of his own fate. Whenever they next met, Lestrange would not delay his death sentence to listen to the bare truth, let alone to the most ornate of Lucius's lies. 

Under cover of a severing hex he fell back to where Potter was shouldering the door of the Patents Office. A spell broke the weak charms that held it.

"On the other side of that wall is a passage. Seal it behind – _Protego!_ " 

Rowle's bullish figure thrust through the smoke.

"Get back!" Lucius's banishing charm struck the floor's volatile carpet of magic at an angle, buckling the planks into a powerful shockwave that pulsed away down the corridor. The walls groaned as spell-stiffened wood and stone was forced to bend. 

Unbalanced by the building's shuddering, Potter was easily ushered into the Patents Office. "Above all else, stay safe. Your death would bring uncontrollable violence, you understand." 

Potter's stance said that he wanted to fight – Lucius, or the Death Eaters, or both. "Look what you've done." In amongst the accusation was a faint note of disappointment. "You've told so many lies that everyone has turned on you. That's your problem. I'm not going to let them have my staff."

His empty wand hand clenched. Heat struck Lucius's back and he did not need to turn to know that Potter had set the corridor wall behind him ablaze.

Lucius blocked his path. "Protect yourself. Leave the staff to me."

Their dealings had never needed to be gentle. He shoved Potter, surprised and stumbling, back into the office and spell-sealed him in. This time, Potter did not fight.

In the wake of a volley of banishing charms that made the whole floor shudder, he strode towards his former comrades. Their shared history meant nothing. Tom, being solitary, had built his unchallengeable leadership on the annihilation of all rival bonds, patiently unfastening family ties, poisoning nascent friendships with a casual word or an unvoiced suggestion. Lucius returned to them with the Killing Curse on his lips. 

Somewhere in the distance, among the smoke lit up by the guttering torches like clouds in a slow lightning storm, the raven's beak snapped with the sound of swords clashing.

 _"Avada Kedavra!"_ Lucius aimed his curse at the noise. The staff rattled onto the ground. The body that must have followed it was silent. 

Ahead, the muffling smoke concealed two more Death Eaters at least. He edged blindly forward, passing dark office doorways, treading carefully through the deep ruts his spell had left, stepping over the body. Not only sound trickled up from the floor below but also the remnants of spent magic, making the lights alternately blaze and founder, tinting the thickening smoke violet. Under the thin light from Potter's waning fire, his ears strained to sift out any hint of nearby movement. Kill Lestrange. That was his one vital goal. Even unarmed, Potter was a match for Rowle. 

The hair on his neck bristled.

"Fancied yourself in the Dark Lord's place, did you?" Lestrange's voice came from the shadowy doorway he had just passed. "You were never one of us. Wouldn't dirty your precious hands with the real work. He kept you for your money, you know. Nothing else." 

Lucius had no choice. He turned. And as he located the deeper shadow of Lestrange's figure, he felt a wand-tip at his back. Rowle reached around to confiscate his wand. 

"Look at you." He let Lestrange talk. There might be one moment's distraction to strike before Rowle's spell took him down. He fixed every fibre of his mind on that single act. Nothing moved outside the Patents Office except the dying flicker of flame, and he would not have wished it otherwise. "The Dark Lord thought he was better than all of us too. The difference is, Lucius, he was."

The habit of emergency defences had not left him: Lucius eased a tiny steel lance from its sheath inside his robe sleeve. If it pierced the skin, it was an inch and a half of speedy death. Lestrange preferred a slow kill, but time would not allow him that luxury here. He had to be brought within reach of Lucius's arm, and quickly.

Lucius murmured, "Potter is more useful than you think." 

Rowle, who must have heard some of those quiet words, said, "Don't worry, we'll dig your little rat out of his hole once we're finished with you. Thanks for leaving me the pleasure of throttling him. You had chances enough to do it."

Another tremor struck up through the floor and the walls. He spoke even more softly. "You could still make him Minister for Magic."

Finally, Lestrange took a single step forward. "Not just vain. You're mad."

"He's susceptible to a well-cast Imperius," Lucius's words tumbled out as Lestrange leaned in closer. His hand with its poisoned lance tensed to swipe at the first possible distraction. "You would need to weaken him first – pain, or a strong dose of lovage – and of course he will fight against it. But if I've been able to achieve it, I don't doubt that-"

_"Petrificus!"_

As the spell struck Lucius's left side and froze him shoulder to foot, he realised three things in the sliver between seconds. The voice belonged to Dawlish. In the roiling smoke, the Auror's acute hearing made him master. And over Lestrange's shoulder, the orange glow of Potter's fire was growing brighter. 

_"Stupefy! Stupefy!"_ Rowle faltered behind him and stumbled against the wall, and Lestrange slipped into the smoke quick as a cat as Lucius's good hand with its lethal lance swung out too late.

It was nothing like the cold-bloodedly choreographed attacks of the old days. Half a dozen wizards in a confined space, fighting to kill or be killed. If Dawlish's Auror companions kept themselves to legal attacks, their leader did not. Spells flew until the space crackled with magic, flaring red and green and white through the smog. The air grew too thin as the Killing Curse stripped the energy out of it and made it burn like acid in the lungs.

Lucius swiped at Rowle's groggy body with his free hand and, as the movement toppled him backwards, he saw that his lance had struck home, although too shallowly to finish him. As the Death Eater collapsed, Lucius snatched his wand and dragged himself backwards with his paralysed limbs weighing him down. A spell gave them back their movement, but the wash of pain and then numbness made his head light. He kept low and quiet and made himself invisible in the mist. A bolt of fire sailed from the corridor's far end, lighting the way before it. Of all things, not- 

_"Avada Kedavra!"_

That was Dawlish, lashing out in all directions. One of the Aurors had fallen and he was no longer waiting for the sound of Lestrange's attack before he loosed another curse. Another bolt of fire launched along the corridor and Lucius strained his eyes to see its source. Potter could not know how many assailants he faced – could not know that Lestrange lurked somewhere along that stretch of corridor. He forced himself to his feet. 

_"Expelliarmus!"_

Reckless and distinctive and absolutely indispensable, Potter was advancing down the corridor with fire issuing from his hands and forming a direct target line to his chest. Idiocy. Foolishness and arrogance. This was a farce of a way for his strategy to end. 

"For Merlin's sake, go back!" Lucius cried.

His muscles sickened and flinched as Dawlish's death curse passed within a hair's breadth of his shoulder. Stumbling, he put himself between Potter and the Aurors, throwing badly aimed blocking spells over his shoulder. This skirmish had to end before Potter became a casualty. Lucius raised his voice - "Where are you, Rabastan? Come out and finish this. You were only ever a battering ram for the cause. Voldemort never-"

_"Avada Kedavra!"_

Although Lucius spun towards the attack, gravity could not drag him down fast enough to escape it. The Auror's curses flew towards the source of Lestrange's voice. A whipcrack of fire curled through the air, faster than sound, and struck the flare of green at the tip of Lestrange's wand, and all that magic went up in burning white light. 

As Lestrange's dark figure was hurled back on a wave of light, the stone corner behind which he had sheltered rumbled and shook. Sped on by desperation, Lucius stumbled down the corridor as the masonry collapsed and dragged part of the ceiling down with it.

Incredibly, Potter was moving towards the destruction, staff in hand. Lucius snatched his arm and stopped him. From somewhere among the debris, Dawlish was screaming. Lestrange was nowhere to be seen but the threat of him tainted the air everywhere, and Rowle was not accounted for.

Dawlish gave another broken groan. On Potter's brow were the lines of determination that only came from other people's peril. Potter clutched his staff and shook off Lucius's grip.

_"Diffindo."_

With one swift spell, Lucius brought the rest of the ceiling down, cutting off Dawlish's cries forever. "Get yourself back to shelter," he snarled with a violence that made his protégé blanch. 

On leaden feet, and aided by shock, Lucius forced him back down the corridor, tensing at every new sound and expecting the final spell to strike between his shoulder-blades at any moment. 

In the wasteland of the Patents Office, with its three empty desks and the single clunky computer terminal lying in pieces and smothered in dust, they reached a temporary haven. Two of its walls were lined with a hatch of wood-and-wire cages, housing magical inventions in varying states of disintegration: a limping pair of empty shoes; a lamp with a fading silver flame that illuminated right through the rock wall behind it; a copper teapot that twitched pointlessly against the glass. 

"In your heart of hearts," Lucius said, bringing on the lights with a flick of his wand, "beneath all the glib little slogans you've absorbed, you cannot believe that everyone is worth saving."

There was no reply as Lucius pushed the sodden, filthy hair out of his eyes in order to seal up the wound on Potter's arm. Then he barricaded the door with every spell he knew and turned back to the wall.

Potter had already forced a narrow gap down its centre, letting in the dank air from the cavern behind it. Lucius parted it like a curtain, with a chorus of creaking wood. Behind lay an unremarkable stone wall and a very remarkable archway, far more striking than the old sketches had suggested. Its grey marble pillars were carved in the shape of hands, with fingertips braced together at its apex: a wizard's hands in perfect likeness, right down to the wand-callus, the slightly overgrown nails and the gnarled knuckles swollen with age and a lifetime of magic.

Potter had moved into the archway and raised a reverent hand to the marble. "What is this?" 

Lucius's halted, realisation trapping the answer on his lips. A hundred metres or less would take them to the end of their journey. The moment where Potter vaulted ahead of his guidance – the moment which until this morning had seemed weeks distant – was almost upon him. Grief surprised him. He found himself staring into the dark tunnel, stunned. Memories writhed, behind his eyes, in the palms of his hands, in all the parts of him this extraordinary young man had touched. 

"An old ceremonial entrance," he answered, gathering himself as he strode into the passageway and braced against the cold and the smothering air. "Don't delay." 

The wall of cages slammed back into place behind them. 

The entrenched gloom seemed to quench Lucius's illumination spell, dimming the light so that they tripped on the sloping corridor floor which was marred with the cracked and lifted paving blocks born of centuries of neglect. Injured and fading, Potter barely kept his footing. Their descent took them to a broad staircase with deep steps and a ceiling so high that the light did not begin to approach it. The air grew even colder, more suffocating, and a slash of Lucius's wand revealed the cause. The foot of the staircase was buried where the roof had collapsed to join the floor.

"Old damage," Lucius said, half to himself, examining the unexpected obstacle. "From the height of the goblin wars."

As he lit a torch and edged forward in its flickering light, the floor shuddered under the impact of another distant spell. Protruding from the rubble was the tip of an enormous finger, its girth wider than his torso. This was the lower gateway. They couldn't be more than a few dozen yards from the centre of the conflict in the Atrium and from the fruition of all of his work. A few rock-plagued yards.

"Save your strength," he said as Potter raised the staff. "There will be little enough protective magic left in the roof after all these years. We are outside the main shaft of the building. A mis-aimed blast will bring seven storeys of earth upon our heads. "

This obstacle had to be overcome. On its far side was a moment that would knit Potter's myth into something enduring and untouchable, lending his name a sanctity that even Lucius himself would not be able to tarnish. Potter, at the peak of all his potential, could hold the magical world in the palm of his hand. 

At his side, Potter crouched down to touch the floor with his fingertips. "The Atrium is just on the other side, isn't it? They must be tearing the place apart to make it shake like this." He rose again, all trace of excitement bleeding out of his voice. "Not in my name, Lucius. The sooner we get this thing out of my way, the sooner I can stop this."

The torchlight circled his glasses in reflected flame. It was almost impossible to believe he had ever been made helpless. 

"Certainly," Lucius said.

At a wand-stroke, an almost imperceptible glow floated back towards them, brightening and intensifying, and out of the darkness flew a single firefly, a ball of golden light seeming to carry its dark body as an afterthought. Lucius cast the spell again and again, transfiguring one stone at a time from the roof down, and what was left of the roof held its shape. The tunnel walls and the pile of debris sparkled with little starry lights as the sounds of the continuing struggle came in louder and more distinctly through the growing gap.

Potter stepped gingerly into the first of the rubble, listening. "They're ripping up the whole Atrium. Bloody hell, what do they think that's going to get them? More arrests, more deaths."

There was a slot at the top of the mound now, empty space hanging beneath what was left of the roof. Fresh air flushed through it, tangy with magic and smoke, and that first lungful seemed to bring Potter wholly back to life. He picked his way further up the slope. Draping down his back, Lucius's cloak left his shoulders bare, emphasising both the strength in him and the injuries that clad him like a shirt. 

He wore that look that Lucius knew so well now. A bird about to take flight. Sprung muscles and wings all ready to unfurl; sleek motion and a mind sky-bent. The silvery fur around the hood was flecked and matted like feathers.

From the Atrium came a shriek of tortured metal and a crash that vibrated in his bones. 

Lucius's cry was too late. Potter was darting up the slope, sure footed, launching himself towards the gap. With the staff pushed through before him, he forced his way through the small space, ripping Lucius's cloak free when it caught. With a last flash of dirty soles, he slithered away and vanished. 

There was no choice. Lucius pushed himself up the slope, rubble shooting out beneath his boots. His path was marked with light as the fireflies caught the current of fresh air and surged towards the breach. A blade of rock stabbed its way under the edge of his kneecap as he thrust himself into the gap, arms first, hands scrabbling for any sort of hold. Stretching his body long and thin, he wriggled through the jagged tunnel, knife-edges of rock tearing his flank as he kicked his legs. 

It was his wand that trapped him. Sheathed in his robe, it wedged into the rock and caught like an arrow barb. He could not go forward without breaking it. He could not twist his arms back to free it. A trickle of blood ran over his neck and down his front. In the chamber below, Potter disappeared towards the rainbow of spells, orange and silver reflecting off his face. He did not look behind him. The only true master was master of everything.

In the coming moment, all these weeks of hardship and hypocrisy would reach their climax. Lucius's legacy would be set in stone. He could not wait. 

Lucius forced his body forward. The wand caught. The wand broke, releasing its blazing magic through his flesh, and through the packed earth around him. Above, the roof and all those tonnes of rock gave an almighty shudder. A stalagtite plunged like a slaughterman's blade into the cavern floor. He thought of the Manor, lonely and derelict and beautiful, and the marble crypt that housed the bones of his ancestors and his wife. He thought of his son, cast adrift once more. Wiltshire was a world away from this shabby tomb, from an eternity spent within spitting distance of the Ministry's squalid political trifling.

He growled through his teeth as he gained another few excruciating millimetres, the rock points gouging like Basilisk fangs at his flanks. No spell in his arsenal could make the slightest impact on seven storeys of earth. With a groan of worlds parting, the rock above clove apart, sending the downslope in front of him into motion, first a trickle of dirt, then pebbles, then larger stones bounding with gravity at their heels. He dragged in another lung full of dust-laden air and savoured it. Eyes closed, he pictured his desk in the library, with its view over the apple orchard and his place-marked books unfinished and the ice melting in Potter's empty glass.

He heard one single spell. _"Accio!"_ No object needed to be stated – the staff was in Potter's hand and the full force of his spectacular will was fixed on Lucius, on Lucius alone. With a sickening rip of cloth and flesh, Lucius flew forward, sprung from his tomb, and into Potter's hands. 

Their forearms clasped together as Potter swung around to absorb his momentum. Their muscles braced at the same moment, keeping them upright as his feet hit the ground and they staggered to a halt. With a gust like a death sigh, the roof gave its final collapse, crushing the little opening beneath its mass. The farthest-flung debris collected by their feet. 

The white light of a distant spell cast haggard shadows over Potter's brow, but his grip on Lucius's arms held firm, bearing him up as his newly torn wounds gushed and bathed him in pain. No matter how angrily he forbade it, his body sagged in that reliable grip. "You have to walk." Potter shook him. "I can't wait for you."

And then he was bending to pick up his fumbled staff as Lucius steadied himself and drew air into lungs he had thought he would not get to use again. 

When he stood, Potter held two unexpected objects in his hand. One was Lucius's mangled wand. The other was Draco's portable telephone with its last picture still dully visible: a helpless figure, beaten and bloody, enveloped in black wires. 

He regretted looking into Potter's face. "This was not your choice to make," Potter told him with a depth of contempt Lucius had never imagined on him. "You're just another Death Eater. Stay away from me."

He hurled both objects into the wall. The wand struck feeble white sparks and fell hissing to the ground. The telephone shattered into the rubble. As Potter strode off towards the Atrium, following the trail of fireflies, Lucius said the futile word anyway.

"Harry-"

The sound echoed back at him. He had hoped for time and calm to allow Potter to tease out the threads of his plan and forgive enough of it for some sort of accord to be salvaged. His pride had fondly anticipated the moment when his strategy would be appreciated. Of all the twists he had accounted for, why did this detail – the least and the most consequential – have to be the one that slipped through his grasp?

His damaged body flushed hot and cold as he disobeyed Potter's command and followed. 

From this heightened vantage point, the air above the battle illustrated its fierceness. The flashes of white and gold and red filled the massive vault of the room, shrinking it to claustrophobic smallness. A burst of fire snapped heavenward and vanished into soot, swept away in a wave of sparks from yet another spell. 

Potter stood on a dust-coated granite balcony, the old ministerial platform that had lain disused since the end of the wars and the symbolic raising of the brotherhood fountain beneath it. It belonged to a foreign history where Ministers had addressed their citizens from a height. 

Hands straining around the balustrade, Potter scowled at the scene. A vastly outnumbered force of Aurors, Muggle Advisory enforcers and sympathetic Wizengamot members, cornered against the fountain, were fighting for their lives against a vast crowd of furious protesters. In the thin no-man's-land in between, spells clashed and exploded. Every witch and wizard for miles around the city was present, either on the streets outside or here in this space, packed in so close that only the forward-most had the space to cast a spell. McGonagall, Weasley, Dumbledore, Pennicuik – the faces he recognised leading the throng were all decent ones, but by the near wall, a corpse with a bloody rictus grin attested to a different sort of trouble-maker. As he watched, a lance of black light struck through the crowd and three casualties fell, skin smoking. A favoured Death-Eater spell, but the caster was invisible in the crowd. He edged forward, trusting to the shadow and the day's toll of dust and shadow and blood to disguise him.

"What the hell is this?" Potter's furious eyes shone in the spell-light. 

The crowd no longer gave voice to its demands, but along the wall a Muggle Advisory official suspended ten feet off the ground, arms wheeling in terror, cried, "We can't find him! It's the truth – he's gone, he's gone," before his voice cut off in an ominous gurgle. 

Potter hissed. His ribs expanded and firmed as he forced his broken bones to accommodate a deep breath. Then he raised the staff and with both hands brought it thundering down onto the balcony floor. 

"Stop!"

His cry, amplified a hundred-fold by the extraordinary magical object in his hands, shook the very walls. 

All other sound in the room was swept away as his voice reverberated in the silence. The closest wizards looked up first, and a wave of upturned faces fanned out from the fountain, bloodied, soot-streaked, illuminated first with hope and then with delight. In the shocked lull began a deep rumble. Between Potter's feet, at the base of the staff, the granite parted. A split the width of man's hand spread downwards, jagged as a lightning bolt. All eyes were drawn to it as the destructive sound grew, the single fissure spreading through the fountain itself, toppling the golden wizard figure with a crash into the water, and penetrating further still, shattering the black marble of the Atrium floor as startled onlookers skipped away from its unknown depths. The rent mangled its way up the opposite wall, spread out in a spider-web of tiny cracks, and came to a halt.

Black-cloaked, bare-chested, his hair taut with the immense charge of magic in him, Potter stood in the footsteps of past tyrants and unknowingly staked his claim. He had no need to appeal to their intellects. His most formidable weapon was that everything about him spoke directly to their hearts. Before the first fierce whispers had begun, he had already made himself Minister for Magic, and so much more besides. 

Lucius had known that this triumphant moment would also be his most vulnerable. He scanned the crowd, looking for the hoods that would disguise the outlaw Death Eaters whom only Rookwood's contacts could have smuggled into the Ministry's core. In the smoke of dissipating spellwork, hundreds of figures were reduced to smudges. He cast his best attempt at wandless disillusionment and edged forward from the shadow, until he was close enough to get in the path of any attack, if it came to-

An instant too late, instinct drew his eye to a something not right – a robe sleeve upraised and behind it a drawn wand, ash wood which he recognised without seeing Lestrange's face. Lucius surged forward, too late, much too late to fling out an arm.

 _"Stupefy!"_ The wand hovered for a moment before its bearer lurched into unconsciousness. The wizards nearby stepped back to let his body fall, as heads turned to where Margot Harrington-Blotts had felled him from behind. Lucius continued examining the crowd – there, with his slowly retreating steps making him conspicuous, was Rookwood – Mulciber and two more followed him. They were beyond his range and, a moment later, lost to view. 

The excited voices started up again, every second tongue repeating Potter's name like a charm. 

"Stop it," Potter said again, his soft command gradually conquering the clamour.

Covered by the last of the noise, Lucius gave a short, shrill whistle. At his signal, high up near the skeletal remains of the Ministry's gates, a puff of flame burst like a budding flower, and from it swooped a scarlet bird. Turning effortlessly calm circles, the phoenix descended to Potter without waiting for his summons, oblivious to the hundreds of eyes watching her, and took a gentle grip on his shoulder. With an almost imperceptible tilt of his head, he accepted her tears. 

On the floor below, not a single wand remained raised. One or two lingering spells slowly smoked themselves out. A single-minded hunger rose from the diverse crowd. If not for the storey height difference, they would have closed like a great hand over Potter, seizing him for the mere sake of touch.

Only those of Lucius's creed cared to remember it, but in ancient times, wizards had taken kings. 

Unlike the physical prowess of Muggles, magic was not equal. It could not be reduced to democracy. It was not gifted evenly among all of its practitioners, it could not be acquired by sheer determination, and those who wielded it in uncommon proportions naturally made themselves leaders – leaders not so much by coercion as by mutual yearning. It was no more than a force of nature. Since a wizard was partly the master of his magic and also, partly, its servant, he had no resistance when his magic recognised a greater power and urged accord with it. 

The memory of the glory days of the god-kings ran deep in the veins of the magical world. Potter had been born to be a king and raised to be a martyr, and all the events of his young life had shaped him for exceptional leadership. It had taken Lucius to bring him his throne. 

"Put your wands away," Potter said, his voice deep and rugged in his raw throat as it strained to reach them. "Go home. It's over."

It took a moment for some of the nearer onlookers, with a measuring glance at their opponents, to return their weapons to the folds of their robes, and once the first of them complied, the crowd followed. So it would always be, Lucius hoped. Those who remained unconvinced of Potter's divinity would be too few to stand against the tide of believers. 

They stood at Potter's feet, drawn to him, unwilling to leave his presence. They had made him. They had claimed him. They had come here today because it had taken the threat of losing him to make them realise that he stood for them, and they for him, and that he held their hearts in his hand. Their allegiance was given in that moment; the contract between ruler and subjects signed in blood.

Lucius, who would never again be any man's servant, sank further into the shadows, retraced his steps and limped through the newly made void in the collapsed roof, back along the corridor, back to the secure Floo points on the Minister's floor, back towards his home. 

**


	6. Grace

Behind the Manor's strongest wards, Lucius slept for twenty hours, unwashed, before the rubbing of his many wounds against the bed sheets drew him awake. It was early afternoon and the wash of grey light on his wall was so familiar that it was difficult to believe that almost everything had changed. 

The tending of his injuries took hours, with his depleted potions store and a makeshift wand that was a poor substitute for the one he had lost. After that, the contrast with the desperate pace of his last four weeks was too tempting: he drew out a book from his library – one of the antiques borrowed from Potter's collection – and read it cover to cover. So passed the second day also, with only Draco's occasional footsteps providing any link with the world beyond the gates.

On the third day, for the first time, he accepted one of the Floo calls which had flashed intermittently in the library's fireplace. It was from Percy Weasley and he had found himself curious. 

"Mr Malfoy," Weasley said, flustered, or pumped up with efficiency, or both. "Good morning." 

There followed the usual awkward pause that should have been occupied by the pleasantries which Weasley had never learned how to deliver and Lucius was not currently minded to fill in. 

"What can I do for you?"

"Avalon Towers," Weasley said. "When you were-" He stopped short, because Lucius's influence had never been reduced to something so mundane as a job title. "When- Do you know anything about the Ministry getting legal advice on the project finance deed?"

Offically, the Ministry had done nothing of the kind. Unofficially, Lucius had been made sufficiently furious at the prospect of Muggle ownership of magical land that he had siphoned off a great deal of money from Muggle Advisory's expenses fund and spent it on the most outrageously priced legal opinion the city had to offer. 

"Let me think."

He wondered – not, admittedly, for the first time – what the mood of the Ministry building was like today, as the reins of government were picked up amid the ruins of Monday's riot. Who was soothing Gringotts' ruffled feathers? How had the popular Margot Harrington-Blotts fitted in to the elected legislature? On whom had the retributive axe fallen? And, of course, there was Potter. 

"The financiers are becoming unpleasant. They were used to having a direct line to the Minister, and now they have to deal with me." Weasley sounded airy and pleased. "When I've got a free moment from all the rest. They want to come in for a meeting tomo-"

"On no account must you allow that to happen." Weasley's pallor said that the meeting had already been scheduled and would have to be cancelled. "The tenor of the advice – which presumably was among those of my papers lost in the destruction on Level Five – was that very specific procedures must be followed before the financiers can terminate the agreement and possess the Avalon Towers site. Notices will need to be sent – have the Muggle communication channels been restored?"

"Only the telephone. The others are a low priority and they won't be repaired for a month at least."

Very well done. A month was long enough to find a reason to keep them permanently closed. "Denied post and facsimile, they will be forced to supply the notice by placing it personally in the hands of the Ministrer. No Muggles must be permitted to approach the Ministry building, and the Minister must not allow himself to visit any Muggle location where it might be attempted. It is they who will be in the wrong, once the Ministry calls upon them to fulfil the agreement and they refuse." 

Weasley absorbed every word in silence. Absent, Lucius noted with satisfaction, was any quibbling about the ethics of the course of action. When the need was sufficiently dire to deny him the luxury of sophistry, Weasley could devote himself entirely to necessity. It was the suspicion of that very quality that had motivated Lucius to shield him from the iniquitous closing days of the Fudge Ministry.

Weasley was looking down at his notes, uncomfortable. "The Minister wants to know when you can come in for a meeting. He hasn't been able to make contact with you." 

His gaze was evasive: had he guessed, or had he been told something?

"You may inform the Minister," Lucius replied, "that my presence is unnecessary. I will leave you to your business."

In an instant, Lucius had snuffed out the connection. That one conversation, however, worked like a hole in a fly-screen. It let the political world inexorably back in. 

**

It was imperative to let Potter find his own way. Lucius told himself this throughout the rest of the day, as he sent his owl off for the newspapers and finally turned himself to the unappealing task of planning a future that, for the first time in a long while, stretched past the immediate few days. 

He had never meant to create another puppet in the Fudge mould. His last philanthropic act had been to give his nation the leader it required, and such a gift could only be given without reservation. In relinquishing his own claims on Potter, he did not greatly fear the influence of ambitious rivals. He had been careful to include among his lessons the perils of surrendering to the temptation to trust. As long as he retained his wounds, at least, Potter would keep his own counsel.

The following morning, the breakfast table remained taciturn. Father and son still had not discussed any details of Draco's time abroad, although Lucius gathered he had stuck to the more heavily commercialised of the Aegean islands and made do as best he could with the sort of kitchen labour his pride would never allow him to speak of. Narcissa was remembered chiefly in the pains they both took to divert from subjects that might lead to her. Neither of them had cared to share any thoughts on the future. 

"I can bring back marmalade," Draco said, not looking up at the folded crepe growing cold on Lucius's plate, mopping up the last of the serving he had cooked for himself. "If you prefer." 

Under the dyed hair, Draco's white face pulled itself into lines as unforgiving as ever. But absence had given him a new son. Two and a half years had worn the edge of arrogance off him. If he still knew himself superior, he had learned to hide it – a wise advantage in a young man who lacked the subtlety for destroying his enemies. The improvement made Lucius fond. Draco was not destined for greatness, but something fine could be made of him, with the right opportunities. He regretted not having realised it earlier. 

"This is good," he said. 

Draco swallowed, and looked down at his father's plate and then his own, and straightened his knife. "Thank you."

"What did you make of Diagon Alley?"

Arms folded on the table, Draco answered with the wariness of an examination student. "Busy. There's a lot of work being done. It looks like some of the Muggle stores are moving out – the coffee place by the post office was boarded up and the other one was nearly empty. I went to the Leaky to see Tom – thank him for – you know. But they were packed with people so I left a note. He's taken the televisions out, and the "no magic" sign. It looks like they're not going to wait for the laws to change."

So the morning's paper had observed. 

"You found him persuadable then?"

If he was surprised to see Lucius pursue a topic that had not been touched for almost three days, he didn't show it. 

"I did." Draco made an adjustment to the angle of his knife. "You were right. He didn't like the idea, and he didn't trust me as far as he could spit, but in the end he couldn't refuse to do something to help Potter. I gave him the early pictures. The squib in the TV shop was harder, but when he worked out that he'd get a copy of shots that would make him famous, then he liked the idea. They were ten deep around his window when your signal cut off."

The silence was expectant. Potter had always known when he had done well. His ego was more resilient than Draco's, even if he kept it to himself. Like Lucius, he had thrived without the need for soft praise – or at least he had got by. Lucius looked at his son in the clear light and wondered if another father might have etched the lines on him in different places. Draco was here, and that was something. But it might simply be that he had nowhere else to go.

"You did well," he said. 

Draco carefully put the lid back on the honey-pot and continued to express no curiosity about how or when Lucius's strange allegiance with Potter had arisen.

Instead, he said, "I thought I'd go into Gringotts. The queues might be better today."

Certainly there were bridges to be mended on that front. 

"Wear your formal robes." He glanced at the faded grey jersey that currently concealed his son's arms. "Go straight to the counter. Queuing is not a useful habit to acquire." 

He could see that Draco would have to steel himself to do it. 

"All right."

"And stop by the library before you leave. There is a message I'd like you to deliver."

The details of the letter itself were inconsequential, but it took him a good deal of trouble to phrase them in a satisfactory manner. The words that had come to him so fluidly when disaster had hung upon them would not obey him at all, now that he was at leisure. He was still bent over his desk a long while later, crossing out another inapt phrase and rethinking it. 

"I can make a second visit this afternoon if you need more time."

Even as he recognised Draco's voice, his head was snapping up, remembering another figure leaning in that doorway with his skin rain-slick and his temper reckless. He had expected this, of course. He had known that a life no longer centred around Potter would take some time to get used to. 

"No. Take this to the Minister's office." He watched carefully for any slip that showed distaste. "Place it in the Minister's own hands."

Draco nodded once. In the stiff dark blue robes that emphasised his height, he was a picture of Malfoy composure, not a trace of the dark flamboyance of Narcissa's family. He perhaps had strengths in places Lucius had never thought to look. He tried to imagine his son wielding a frying pan for the first time – wrist-bones aching, skin scalded by oil, nerves frayed with fighting the instinct to flinch, shamed by the memory of house elves in their filthy rags. He could not picture how his coddled son might have accustomed himself to that comfortless life. 

"I'll do my best," said Draco. 

Lucius added a final sentence to the letter and signed it. 

"Draco," he said, surprising himself, just as the hem of the blue robes was disappearing. 

Draco returned in an instant. "Father."

"If you mean to stay in the country," he said, voicing the possibilities as they occurred to him, "you will need to see about an occupation. Something that allows you to stand on your own two feet."

Draco recoiled as if receiving a long-expected rebuke. "I do have the money that Mother left me. I can pay something towards – towards –"

They had barely spoken for over three years. How had it come about that all he expected at his father's hand was dismissal?

"I don't mean money. You'll have enough of that if I decide to let you take the estate. Public opinion will be volatile for some time, especially in apportioning blame. Blood has always made us a convenient target, and this is not a time to appear indolent." 

"I see," Draco said, trying out the thought for a long time. "You want me to see if Potter will find me something. Charity, is it? Payment for services rendered." 

His mouth locked in the old snide curve. He was young, Lucius thought, and still the servant of his pride. Maybe he always would be. 

Then Draco shrugged. "I've worked for worse."

The departing soles of his shoes were shredded with holes, but his rigid stride disclosed no hint of it.

**

The Kappa pond was four hundred years old, its specimens bred for fierceness, stealth and grace. An eighteenth century forebear had planned a tunnel system to spread them through all the Manor's waterways, should the wars approach the borders of his domain. Under later masters and their mistresses, white-pebbled paths, birch trees and oriental arches had grown up around it. 

Lucius moved from archway to pillar, reinforcing the wards that confined the deadly creatures inside. In dark, wet weather, even a wizard might find himself outmatched by a pack of them, but presently the late afternoon sunlight, faint as it was, kept him safe. 

In the willow's shade, by the bench where he had sat with Evan and Severus and swapped prophetic boasts about their eagerness for risk and sacrifice, he found a black plastic watch. Its origin was not hard to deduce. Over the weeks of rain since the evening when he had witnessed the assault on Martin Bobbin, the desperate finger-ruts in the grass must have been washed away. The only trace of the doomed Muggle who had caught his Portkey was a scattering of white pebbles leading in the direction of the pond's glinting surface. With a cursory examination, he tossed the watch in. Silvery webbed fingers rippled the water and dragged it under.

They were Malfoy creatures, ancient and dangerous. His chest stung with regret at the thought of abandoning them. Once no choice was left to him, however, Draco would learn to master them. 

The sunlight was illuminating the tops of the trees like candles and he was still standing a pace from the water's edge, following the murky play of limbs among the reeds, when he became aware of a presence among the archways behind him. He had not felt any tremor from his wards. 

"Good afternoon, Minister."

Potter was too busy examining him to flinch at the three-day-old title. 

Lucius continued, "You're here unannounced. Is this an official visit?"

In his anachronistic black robes, Potter seemed a natural part of the formal garden, except that his step was stiff. 

"Of course not. I want to talk to you."

His bearing had become a little more guarded since Lucius had met him last. The contrast between that professional poise and the nonconformist streak that must still lie beneath it gave Lucius a flare of desire. 

He drew himself up. "I believe I've responded to your requests."

"Sending Draco down with a note and an excuse isn't the sort of help I expected." The irritation quickly passed from his face. "I understand what you're doing for him. I'll help him if I can – as long as he keeps out of trouble. But Draco isn't what I need."

A soft splash among the reeds drew Potter's scrutiny away from him. Potter crouched down at the edge of the water, watching the Kappa follow his hand as it wove in slow circles just above the surface. 

"Margot Harrington-Blotts," he said without looking up. "I can trust her, can't I?"

Months ago, over the course of that extraordinary first night, Potter himself had taught Lucius the pleasure to be gained in marshalling his long experience and making a gift of it. The satisfaction was every bit as strong now that he was advising the highest power in the land. 

"You can trust her to pursue the agenda she believes in, openly and with remarkable diligence. Manage her carefully when that agenda departs from yours."

Potter mulled that over in silence, contemplating, Lucius hoped, how it might be done. 

"I was thinking about Aberforth Dumbledore."

"Every inch a maverick but extremely useful for bargaining. You would be a fool to offer him a Ministry. But in a pinch, if you put him forward as your first-choice candidate, the compromise you negotiate down to will seem a moderate by comparison."

"Ogden?"

"You've had opportunity enough to observe him."

As Potter's hand stilled, a pair of pale yellow eyes peered up at it. 

"Arthur Weasley?"

"Don't lay his fate at my door. You know his short-comings. Make your own choice."

"For heaven's sake, Lucius." A tail lashed the water's surface as he stood. "This is your Ministry as much as mine. We've talked about it for months. Why have you got cold feet all of a sudden?" 

It was as if he were taking up one of their old debates from the library or the bedroom. As if the last three weeks had never happened. As if Lucius's great betrayal were a trifle, unworthy of remembering.

"The one firm promise you wished me to make was that you should be free of my influence. You were quite emphatic."

That certainly brought his memory back. Potter's hands sought out the pockets in his robes and he fell quiet. The estate was quiet. It was the hour when the light, falling almost at a horizontal, struck the haze of magic that lay over the Malfoy lands and enclosed them in a faint dome of violet-blue luminescence. With that illustration of the majesty of magic and of everything he had worked towards, it was impossible to feel regret. 

Potter, whose nocturnal visits might never have revealed this view, was looking at it too, as he backed a few paces away to get a wider perspective.

"You should have this back." What Potter drew out was Lucius's broken wand, folded in two with the dragon heart-string exposed. He conquered the automatic distress of seeing his wand in another wizard's hand. "Get rid of it. Even in this state, if they really wanted to get you, there has to be some way to trace the last spells it cast. "

"Which spells do you mean, Harry?" he asked as he took it. "The ones I used to maim or to kill?"

For an instant, Lucius thought that Potter would strike him. But Lucius's tuition had been good; he could now, it appeared, rise above provocation.

"If you're going to throw this back in my face, then tell me straight out that you don't want my help. Otherwise you can take it gracefully."

Lucius was still digesting this extraordinary rebuke when Potter continued. 

"Which one of the Death Eaters should I encourage to run for the Wizengamot?"

One of the topics they had seldom discussed was the fate of Lucius's former colleagues. Given the inevitable allegations during his arrest, it had been imperative that Potter acquire no scrap of knowledge that might inadvertently be disclosed.

"Only Rookwood," Lucius told him as he considered. "He is the most pragmatic of the lot and if you give him an alternative to outlawry, he will embrace the chance to live out a comfortable old age. Resist the temptation to trust him. You'll need an energetic observer to keep his intriguing under control – I recommend the oldest of the Weasley offspring. On no account return Rabastan Lestrange to freedom. If you are ever tempted to cast mercy aside, let it be there, because there is nothing you can do to civilise him. The others may be induced to follow you if you give them the right show of strength."

Potter's eyes said that was a confrontation he looked forward to with some pleasure. He had come back to the water's edge.

"And you?"

He watched Potter's black dragon-hide toe edging into the shallows, teasing the nimble twigs of fingers.

"As I have indicated. I will not interfere."

"What?" Potter turned to him. "I meant what ministry should I give you. What do you want?"

That was Potter's presumption entirely. He had never demanded a ministry, nor given any undertaking that he would accept one. How could he? Even now, there was no certainty that Potter would prove to be the sort of leader he wished to be bound to. "You speak as if you already had a permanent appointment to the role."

"There's a lot to get done," Potter said as he nudged away the grasping fingers. 

"Then I wonder why you would put yourself through this farce of an election."

"Ah," Potter sighed. "I thought we might get to that." 

The light was fading. The reeds shuddered with the increased activity amongst them. Lucius walked past the willow to the twin marble seats, where he sat. Potter's steps had never been far behind him. 

"What does it matter if I let them make a choice? We all know they'll choose me. All the things we talked about, Lucius, I'm going to do them. It makes no difference to let them vote for me first."

Oh no, no difference. Only the ultimate difference between servitude and mastery. Only the difference between Muggle and wizard. Only the difference between what Lucius could endure and what he could not. 

"They have chosen you already, in a far more eloquent manner than the ballot box. There is no call to throw away what they have given you."

Potter took the opposite seat, robes falling open over his tailored trousers. "You're worried they won't vote for you," he said. "Don't be."

That might have made him angry, but with the damp smell of night coming off the grass around them and the first beat of bats' wings, he could not rouse himself to it. 

"You are misguided. I will not subject myself to their approval at all."

"They will, you know. They know about some of the things you did – like protecting the Galleon and fighting for Martin Bobbin. And I'll tell them that you're part of my team, all or nothing."

"No."

There was consternation on his brow but not defeat. Lucius's will appeared to be another obstacle to be overcome with persistence and creative bargaining.

"You need an official position. I'm not going to look like I'm just another one of your puppets."

Lucius's smile spread fondly at that long-discarded possibility. "I won't answer to your multitudes, Harry. Your system would leave me subject to the whim of people who barely deserve the title of wizard. Third generation squibs. Traitors who went to the city for money – failures who've abandoned their magic. I won't be governed by those people. Consider it a matter of principle. And whatever you do, understand that it is unalterable."

Potter's hands flattened on his thighs for a long while, providing no medium for his thoughts to be read. He was terribly still, with the willow branches a fluttering, shadow-woven curtain behind him. His shoulders were tight with the weight of other people's futures. 

"I can't make an exception for you," he said eventually. "That choice isn't mine to make."

"And I will not be part of your democratic experiment."

The evening continued to deepen. Only the white paths and the ruffling undersides of birch leaves stood apart from the gloom. The day birds had long since fallen quiet.

"I can't do it. I don’t have the right to decide for them."

"Your judgment is no worse than the ill-informed majority. In fact, better."

Potter's voice turned unpleasant. "You think so, do you? So far today I've helped hide the crimes of a killer and planed the lies I'm going to tell to get him elected. I've done all that because I'm selfish. I did it because it makes me happy, and you think I'm fit to make decisions for the whole country? I'm not special. I'm the opposite of it. I'm-" 

Lucius seized his wrist and jerked him forward, eye to eye. He intended it to hurt right down to the bone, and his unconscious magic would drive the pain deeper. Good.

"Do you imagine that I would have done what I have done for _nobody?_ " Let Potter feel his tenuous grip on his temper, let him see the ugly snarl on his mouth. "The one phrase I will never again hear from your lips is _I'm not special_. You are extraordinary. You will achieve extraordinary things. The rules that bind lesser men were not made for you."

Potter shook his head dumbly. 

"If you will not believe it for yourself, then you must believe it for them. They require a hero. Seizing your full potential is no less than what you owe them."

This time, Potter looked away. A familiar shallowness infused his breathing. He had done nothing to fight the grip on his wrist; in fact, he was leaning into it. 

"Lucius," Potter said, low and unhappy and human. 

Lucius released him like a man stung. He still wanted-

Unthinkable. After all the levels of betrayal they had been through, after the pain he had suffered at Lucius's hands, after all their goals had been achieved and exceeded, here and now, in the highest position in the land – still he could not rise above his body's primitive needs. His ill-advised desire was as infectious as ever, however. Between Lucius's legs stirred the beginnings of a response. In the dark, in the cool grass, on his third day as Minister for Magic.

"The Kappa are at their most dangerous at dusk," he said. "I have business to attend to."

This time, he got as far as the lawn before Potter caught up with him. 

"Okay," Potter said, terse. "Business then. I went in to Gringotts yesterday."

Lucius slowed his pace to a stroll. "It's about time you did. The Chairman will rarely make explicit demands but the greatest sin you can commit is failing to give him due attention." 

"I gave him due attention all right. I gave him a list of what I wanted and a few extras I threw in at the last minute. He wasn't very happy."

That was usually a sign of success. He wondered how Potter's blunt negotiating style had come across next to the goblin's decades of experience, and what tone had been set for the most important dialogue of any Minister's term. 

"What did you manage to extract from him?"

It was all too easy to slip into their well-worn patterns. Potter reported and Lucius answered, first with judgment and then with counsel. They could be back in his library, with their half-drunk brandy glasses discarded and Potter's robes coming open, button by button, under Lucius's hands. 

"Trading resumed by Friday." Potter's note of pride was not undeserved. "Vaultless accounts to be paid out in full by the end of the month. I asked for a loan of seven hundred thousand for the Ministry to compensate the staff in banned Muggle businesses. He gave me half a million on very generous terms."

"And in return?"

"The Avalon Towers site." Hidden in darkness, Lucius smiled at the audacity of that. "And a return of sole rights to exchange the Galleon."

Their path climbed up the last stretch through the rose beds. They had passed the first of the lit torches. 

"You're going through with that?"

"What did you think I'd do? I haven't told anyone yet. Except Percy. He thinks it's impossible to cut us off from the Muggle world. But there's no choice now. So many cross-world businesses have collapsed. The Galleon is a tenth of what it should be and Muggles are running away from it."

"It can be done," Lucius replied quietly. "To most of them, we're barely more than a myth, and their culture already abounds with conspiracy theories and hoaxes. Firm denials and judicious spellwork, and within a generation or two we can make ourselves forgotten. "

As they approached the house, a shadow moved in the doorway.

"Minister," Draco said neutrally, and to his father added, "Dinner will be on the table in a few minutes. I can make it serve three if you'd like."

Lucius knew Potter well enough to read his discomfort in the half-light.

"I should be going. I'm late already."

If Draco thought it surprising that Potter knew the twisting way to the Floo in the foyer, he said nothing. It was only much later, when the veal plates were scraped clean and the sabayon was served, that Draco's deduction emerged.

"It's not blackmail. Is it?"

It was easy enough to know what it wasn't. 

"No," Lucius told him. "Leave it alone, Draco. It will be resolved shortly."

**

Under the regime of Fudge's bankers, the Wizengamot had become used to impotence. Lucius did not need to be present the next day at the formal re-opening of the chamber to know that Potter would rule them. 

Somewhere in that hectic first day, however, Potter must have managed to escape his ministerial duties, because in the early afternoon while Lucius was packing away papers into trunks and stacking them in one of the vast guest bedrooms, a message arrived. Not by owl. Potter clearly wished to command his full attention, because he sent the message in the beak of his phoenix. 

It was an official pardon in the broadest possible language. It covered the offences of which he had long ago been convicted and all the many that had never come to light. At the foot of the page, his attention caught on the signature. 

The phoenix was young and affectionate and did not appear to resent the lowly errand on which she had been sent. She sat at the open window for a long while, watching quietly as he sat on the lid of a trunk and indulged himself in contemplating the proof of what he had accomplished. What they had accomplished together. 

Harry James Potter. Minister for Magic. He ran his fingertip over the green ink. The writing was jagged with big, unhesitating capitals. Minister for Magic. In one unprepared moment, five months of hope and hardship and pride swooped down on him. His heart swelled. Harry James Potter. The phoenix hopped onto the floor to buck her head against his fingers, offering her mute consolation. 

When she had gone, he re-tied the scroll in its ribbon and continued his packing.

**

Potter knew better than to try any of his new skills in manipulation on the man who had taught them to him, but he was not above open persuasion. Before the following day was done, Lucius had received three further messages from the Minister, all on official letterhead. 

The first requested his consent to act as Secretary of the Decree Committee, which would be responsible for taking the Minister's commands and turning them into binding law. The second offered him the newly created Ministry of Goblin Affairs. The third, hastily written, explained what he had already known, that Goblin Affairs would hold the purse-strings of the entire Ministry, subject to consultation with the Minister himself and direct command from no-one. 

He did not reply to any of them. The Minister had not announced a new election date, but his constant use of the word "interim" confirmed that he had not resiled from his commitment to submit himself to the masses' choice. 

This was both thoroughly expected and bitterly disappointing. Lucius had appreciated the risk from the outset. He had always had his own choice to make, between fashioning a pawn and training a leader. He had erred on the side of hope and given Potter the tools he needed to draw his own conclusions. His proudest achievement was not something he could possess. It was freedom that had, in the end, come between them. 

Upon receipt of the fourth letter, which arrived the following day on plain parchment and in four precise lines invited him to name his terms, he wrote an even briefer response. Then he completed the duplicate copies of the deeds on his desk and took them down to the kitchens for his son's signature. After that, all that remained was to get down the trunk he had first packed nearly half a year ago, on the day when Potter had stumbled back into his life and thrown it onto its most unexpected course.

**

Potter's house rose out of the countryside like a decorative fortress, with its high garden wall and the oak glade on its northern side. Lucius approached needlessly on foot. The wards, as it turned out, had been reinstated exactly as he had known them. The phoenix on a low branch sang a note of recognition as he sliced his way through them and entered. 

The state of the interior was to be expected of a man who had hurtled from imprisonment to the frantic pace of leadership. All the same, it displeased him to see Potter's natural tidiness thwarted. His wand swept away the dust and mended the paintwork which the Ministry's spells had damaged. He straightened the furniture by hand and cleaned up the stray plates and glasses. On the bare kitchen counter, he set down the Runespoor cup and the key to the Gringotts vault in which he had concealed the remainder of Potter's dark hoard. Despite his efforts in re-arranging them, the bookshelves and cabinets still looked too empty. 

Unsettled, he wandered out to the garden and pulled weeds from the roots of the spearmint and the rosemary. As the light failed and the first drops of rain rattled the oak leaves, he moved on to the holly bush. His trunk stood ready at the Manor. It might be kinder to leave without dragging out the awkwardness of a formal farewell. He had, after all, been released from their alliance. 

The surge of nearby magic tingled in his palms and a few moments afterwards, Potter stood in the open door.

Still wearing the contained diplomacy of his office, he cast an unhurried gaze over Lucius, lingering on the thick fur collar of his cloak, drawing what conclusions he needed. 

"Where are you going then?"

There was no harm in rewarding a sensible question. "My father's family built a large estate in Switzerland. The magical population lives largely unregulated by government – it is one of the few magical wildernesses on the continent."

"And there are no elections."

"No."

Answering that with a terse nod, Potter went inside. The door swung closed as Lucius came through it. With distracted flicks of his fingers, Potter was bringing the lights on one by one. 

"I'd make you Minister for Magic if I thought I could get the others to accept it," he said. "As it is, I can only offer you the next best thing. But that's not enough for you, is it?"

Wasting none of his attention on the courtesy of firewhisky or tea, Potter leaned on the back of an armchair, hands braced on it.

"Did you think my convictions could so easily be changed?" Lucius asked. 

"None of it was easy. But no. I was appealing to your sense of patriotism."

"I have no such thing."

"Is that so?"

The very cadence of that faintly mocking phrase was Lucius's. Stern and impatient, Potter stood in his formal robes and used his own arsenal against him. He could, he knew, simply walk away.

Instead, he summoned the firewhisky bottle and a glass and installed himself comfortably on the sofa. "I believe the business of government agrees with you, Harry." 

A dark hint of smile turned Potter's mouth. "I like getting things done." As he moved around onto the arm of the chair, for the first time his body lapsed into the casual slouch in which Lucius was accustomed to seeing him. "You would have enjoyed today. I announced my interim Ministry. Some people are upset at being left out – and some of them are upset at being in." 

Arthur Weasley would be the first type – although with the taint of his sons' conduct, he should have expected it. Neville Longbottom would be the second type. Not a decision Lucius would have advised, but then Potter had always been most deeply attracted to comrades with pure beliefs, and he could be forgiven one sentimental choice. 

"I called Aldritch in and told him that I'm moving Muggle Advisory out of the Ministry building. Percy's found them a couple of floors in Battersea, as long as they lose a third of their staff."

The first step, Lucius hoped, in the gradual disposal of the entire department. 

"How was that received?"

Immediately he regretted the question. He no longer had the luxury of taking an interest in Potter's ministerial development. But the old habits were too easy – neither of them remained immune. 

"He took it quietly," Potter reported. "I showed him some very detailed minutes from a meeting late last week. It looks like he was clumsy enough to go on the record as being in favour of _stronger methods of interrogation,_ as he put it."

"Ah. So he was." Lucius had, naturally, been quite particular about which documents from his stewardship survived. 

Potter's stare didn't waver. 

"I noticed your name wasn't in the minutes."

"Of course not."

"Did you oppose it?"

Lucius wanted to loosen his collar. This conversation had the feeling of a closing trap. Very pointedly, he laid his drink on the coffee table. "You know exactly what I did."

"Why did you do it?"

"I believe you know that, too."

Under Potter's scrutiny, he had an unpleasant impression of Aldritch's discomfort, trying to match his will to the Minister's with the neatly printed minutes on the table in front of him.

"You did it because you believe in a principle," Potter said. "A principle that was more important than anything else. Then tell me why you're abandoning that same principle now."

The simple argument caught him unprepared. He resorted, with regret, to dissembling. "I've explained my reasons." 

"Reasons?" Potter's frustration got the better of him, and abruptly Lucius found himself talking to the young man and not the Minister. "You've fobbed me off with some rubbish about elections. If you're going to walk away, you owe me a better reason than that."

Lucius had taken very great pains to cure Potter of unmerited faith in people. His failure taunted him now. His decision was based on pure, selfish will. He was not and never had been a creature of principle. 

"I refuse to watch everything I have worked for squandered in the hands of the very people who voted for the Fudge administration."

"You were happy enough to let them get rid of him."

When, in the flurry of ministerial responsibility, had he had time to rehearse these arguments and plan a response to them? Lucius wet his mouth with another drink. This could be the last time he would have Potter's willing ear and rapt attention, so he went slowly and chose his words like weapons.

"They are fickle, Harry. They will follow you until the first time you thwart their will – or if you are the very soul of agreeableness, they will follow you until they grow bored. You will stand for nothing. You will be a mouthpiece for ill-thought-out opinions and uneducated whim."

Potter's mouth thinned. "I won't be Voldemort."

"I had hoped to cure you of thinking in such simplistic extremes. I am not asking you to become a tyrant. It is not in your nature to deprive people of their dignity. I am asking you not to subject this nation to the folly of the multitudes."

"The multitudes – Lucius, they're the ones I did this for." 

One leg angling down to the floor, the other bent onto the chair's seat, the young minister leaned forward with his antique black robes framing him. The silver crescent fastenings sparkled now that the centuries had been polished off them. 

"You fought for magic, Harry. Above all else, that is what you fought to protect. When you came to me, it was the only pure belief you had left. And magic is more than the generation which happens to wield it at present. It is so much more than that. Oh, your theory of democracy is a lovely _principle_ – terribly comforting and redolent of moral righteousness. Principles are crutches for the weak. If you allow them the choice, they will let the old magic die."

Potter's stillness showed how seriously he took that possibility. 

"No," he said slowly. "I don't think they will. Not now. And who am I to judge them?" 

"Who are you," Lucius scoffed gently. "Who you are has been proved over and over again. You have every right. All that lacks is the will to take what is yours."

Potter was shaking his head, faintly smiling. "I've thought about it, Lucius. Everything you said. But I don't want to be better than anyone else. I just want to do the job."

They could thrust and parry endlessly with the same old arguments, but arguing with Potter on this particular point was like arguing with a snowflake or a mountain-side. Their natures were too foreign to be bridged with words. And this was his last and only chance to turn the tide of history.

There was only one more sacrifice Lucius could make in the name of his ideals. It was pride, and casting it away was a lighter task than he might have thought. 

"For me, Harry. This one concession is all I ask. Give way to me on this one question and on everything else I will follow you."

Potter looked stricken. His mouth clenched. And then he laughed.

"The biggest thing of all, that's all you ask for." He repeated that soft, regretful laugh. "Ask me for something else. Ask me for an unqualified pardon – I've already done that. Ask me for all your funds released. Ask me to make you my chief advisor – my only advisor. Ask me to take you to bed."

The way he coloured faintly at that made Lucius think of crossing the distance between them. 

"Ask me for anything else."

Lucius replied, "Abandon the elections."

"No."

If there was a note of sorrow in his answer, there was no hesitation. Potter had had two days to work out the boundaries of his principles and the only thing Lucius could have despised him for was weakness.

Under Potter's armchair, just by his boots, was an accumulation of dust and flecks of red feather that Lucius's prior attentions had missed. Upon consideration, he did not care to complete the task while Potter watched. 

"There's no reason you have to go today."

"Yes there is." Lucius did not articulate it, however, even to himself. 

Potter slid down into the seat of the chair, looking as close to defeated as Lucius remembered seeing him. It had not occurred to him that he might have acted too soon in withdrawing his support, before Potter was ready. 

"You have been conducting yourself without my advice – or, may I remind you, against it – for weeks now. You can fulfil this office perfectly well without me."

"I know that," Potter said with real scorn and got back to his feet. 

As he fussed about in the kitchen for some herbs for his phoenix's empty cage, Lucius's mind was drawn back to what he had observed of Potter on that first strange night. He could walk his road alone – the last week had proved that neither his judgment nor his willpower depended on Lucius's support. But he was not made for solitude. And although he believed himself ordinary, very few people could match his great potential. 

"I know I can do it by myself." Potter stood a strand of dill in a small vase and rested it on the cage floor. "But I want you here."

Since there was nothing to be gained by repeating terms that had already been rejected, Lucius stayed silent. Potter added a young sprig of sage. Then his urge for activity seemed to flag and he returned to the sofa from which Lucius had not moved. 

"Pour me one."

Lucius summoned a fresh glass and complied. Raising the glass, Potter threw his head back and drained it to the last drop.

Despite himself, Lucius watched the flex of his lips as he sucked them clean. The slick of alcohol highlighted something he had not seen before. On his bottom lip, slightly left of centre, a stroke of raised red flesh jutted out over his lip line. The last of the electrode marks, and a permanent reminder to him and to his subjects of the very worst that could happen. It reminded Lucius all too vividly of a day that still came back to him in his dreams. He fisted his right hand to quash the tender feeling that impelled him to reach out and touch the scar. 

Potter did not miss the gesture. His sigh might as well have articulated Lucius's name. It would have been the simplest matter in the world to grasp his hand and draw him down. 

Through four decades of uncompromising pride and unpopular convictions, Lucius had learned self-control. He knew what strength was, and he had enough of it left to hold himself back from a choice that could only be destructive. It brought no benefit to Potter to be indulged. It weakened Lucius to give way to sentiment – now, when he had already cut the last ties with his old life, transferred his estates to his son and let go his grip on power.

He drew back both his hand and the emotion that had moved it.

Potter said, "Then there's nothing I can do to stop you going."

There was resignation in that, Lucius thought, as if Potter too had recognised the impregnability of Lucius's will and had feared only to slight them both by accepting it too easily. 

"Nothing," Lucius said, struck by the blankness in his own voice, and the contrasting wrench of feeling in his chest.

Potter turned from him.

"Wait a minute then."

There was the familiar sequence of spells as Potter dropped to his knees in the most heavily protected corner of his house, peeling back the wards that had defied the Ministry's most determined attempts to force them. In his deft, patient way, he freed the loose floorboards and laid them aside to grasp the reliquary box. 

"I did say you could ask me for anything."

Lucius sank back on the sofa. He had asked for nothing because a reward would have diminished the integrity of the things he had done, and because it had not occurred to him that there was anything he wanted, apart from the one concession Potter could not bring himself to make. This extraordinary gift, however. Refusing it would be an insult to the rare magic contained in it. 

This time, Potter was Minister for Magic and did not kneel at Lucius's feet. He placed the reliquary box in Lucius's hands and sat beside him. He polished the pale sapphire with the pad of his thumb and raised the lid.

Inside, the scrap of Merlin's wand lay on its threadbare velvet cushion. "It always worked better for you," Potter said.

"Harry-" How absurd that he should fumble for words. He was in unfamiliar waters, certainly. Never in his life had he been the recipient of the strength of feeling Potter was displaying at this moment. But mere novelty should not unman him. Potter was in his debt – that was the meaning of this gift. The advantage was still Lucius's. And yet he could not make himself look up from the box's shadowed depths.

"Take it."

His hand moved unbidden, eager now that the possibility of touch was permanent. Unhesitant, he plunged into the box and withdrew the length of wood, clutching it for the first time in his full grasp. The flood of history and power was less this time, and more. His eyes were blind to the present as images possessed them – the horse, the woman, the lake, the bright silver blade – but this time, his sure grip brought him control. He drifted through the patchy wand memories at will, immersing himself in one then another as the power surged in his wand arm. It told him he could kill a man with a breath, or fly, or raise new continents. And all the while, a papery voice crackled in his mind, whispering spells, old spells, fragments and incantations that made him feel drunk with anticipation.

He laid the wand in its box and waited for his vision to shimmer back into focus. The reverberations of its magic were as potent as ever. The possibility of immortality seemed to flow in his veins. 

He had thought he had known strength before, but the grip of the wand's spell showed him a new definition. His past strength had been conservatism, his resilience born of fear. Potter eased the box closed and fastened its catch. Denying what they both wanted was the easy choice, not the brave one. He knew that whatever he allowed to happen today, with his protégé, with his lover, with Harry, they would both survive it. The price was only pain. There was nothing to fear. 

"Harry," he said again, a very different word this time. Harry heard the change and reached for him, firm hand around his wrist. If this was a measure of strength, Harry had always been the stronger of them. 

Everything was changed, now that there was no grander strategy in their coming together than the pleasure of the act. The shift from distant goals to immediate ones strained his focus. It was no easy matter for Lucius to let his body guide him without intellectual intervention. He had no faith in the wisdom of his heart; Harry had the advantage there too. 

Harry lifted Lucius's hand and brought the palm to his cheek. His gaunt face was softened by the boyish ruffled hair over his ears, but his eyes would always hold a long adult lifetime. He breathed in sharply as Lucius's thumb stroked the line of his jaw. Once, his lips parted as if he was going to speak, but instead he reached for the collar of Lucius's robes and unfastened the first button. 

"Go on," Lucius murmured. 

In a sudden launch of movement, Harry's mouth was on his neck, hard and punishing, and only long familiarity told Lucius it was a torn sort of caress. "Go on," he repeated, and laid his hand over the bare curve at the top of Harry's spine. Even so, it was a while before Harry's savage kisses calmed and he drew back.

Whenever he found himself pitted against Harry's intractable will, it was easy to think of him as a contemporary. But now, under the wand's persuasion, with Harry's flushed lips shimmering in his evasive face, Lucius felt every degree of his advantage. He removed Harry's glasses and put them aside. He touched the scar on Harry's lip, and the silvery one on his brow. But beyond that, he made no demands. He disciplined himself to be still as Harry undressed him, drawing stiff buttons from their holes, one by one, from his neck down to his navel. Harry's palms pushed the cloth back off his shoulders.

That was another legacy of Harry's. All his adult life, Lucius had worn his skin like a mere undershirt, a commonplace barrier for keeping his blood sealed in. Tom, the pitiless scholar, had scrawled his mark on it like parchment. But in Harry's bed, he'd remembered his skin for what it was – an organ, no less than his heart or his liver. His nipples contracted, untouched. Anything but a shield, his skin turned vulnerable – naked and nervy in anticipation of the friction of Harry's touch.

"It wasn't for luck," Harry said, withdrawing his hand. "You were right."

In two weeks, the snidget feather pendant had become so familiar around Lucius's neck that, even if he had foreseen the evening's developments, he might not have thought to remove it. Harry, however, had not seen the object since the night Lucius had taken it from around his sleeping neck.

"This belongs to you," Lucius said. 

His fingers struggled with the tiny catch. When it was displayed on his palm, Harry looked at it warily. 

"Take it. It would please me to see you wearing it."

They would never speak of Lucius's betrayal, unless it were flung out in the heat of some unforgivable temper. This obscure sort of gesture was the best he knew how to offer. 

Harry did not put it around his neck, but he slipped it into his pocket. 

His hands came back to Lucius's chest, bolder and firmer. They sought out the nearly vanished wounds from the roof collapse in the Ministry – the marks of his mortality. Over the tenderest bolt of scar tissue, Harry dug in his fingers until Lucius's lips drew back in pain. 

He seized the back of Harry's neck and jammed their mouths into a kiss. There was a jolt from Harry, but no hint of retreat. Forcing a softer angle, he stroked his tongue into Lucius's mouth as his hands roamed over shoulders and neck and chest. That confident touch put the first pulse of arousal in Lucius's groin. 

Burst free of the bonds of self-control, Harry drew himself up on his knees on the sofa, giving him a height advantage that he used to full effect on Lucius's mouth. Demanding, fumbling, he seemed to put away his adult composure and give in to the greed of his youth. Refusing to relinquish the kiss, Harry jerked left-handed at the buttons to get Lucius's cock free – and with a few firm strokes it was in as needy a state as Harry could have wished for.

If he had never tallied the days of their separation, he felt every second of it now. His muscles had accustomed themselves to the thrust and clench of sexual contact and the lack of it had left them wasting. Now, woken from slumber, his body resumed its eager rhythm ahead of his mind. Fingers clutched Harry's shoulders, his hips pumped up into that firm grip. The need for satisfaction overtook him. Harry's teeth were on his neck, tongue flat on his cheek, on his mouth, eyes dazzling and hard when they flickered open. Then Harry was kissing and biting a path over his chest, rearranging himself to bend over Lucius's lap. 

"Harry." He could say that much as Harry's mouth opened wide over the wet head of his cock and sucked it. Licked, sucked, stroked, teased, bit – eyes wide open now, Harry wielded every hot and sharp millimetre of his mouth in service of Lucius's pleasure. Stoking the lingering heat from the wand shard, it smothered him in sensation. Competing with the thick smell of his arousal, from deep under the black robes, from the damp linen of Harry's collar, seeped the hidden scent of his day. Stress. Hard work. Determination. Lucius's nostrils filled with the toll of a thousand subtle victories – the quiet imposition of Harry's will.

His palm brushed with the shifting texture of Harry's hair, he let his head loll back as desire and ambition and Harry's beautiful mouth undid him. 

It took a long while for his senses to come reliably back to him, afterwards. Harry knelt, still panting slightly, on the sofa beside him. The wand's grip on him felt stronger, not weaker. With a quick spell, he stripped his boots off and slid off the rest of his clothes. He indulged in one kiss for Harry's mouth and one slow hand-stroke for the erection that strained the front of his trousers. 

"Yes," he said, tasting Harry's mouth again. "I'd like you to take me to bed."

Harry seized his hair and fastened him to the kiss for a long time. "Good," he said afterwards, smile breaking through. "I hoped you would."

He watched Harry emerging from his clothes, shedding all the hallmarks of his high office. There was no question of penetration: he didn't care for the spells that substituted magic for manhood. Leaning back on the bed-sheet, knees slightly parted to display the full extent of his desire, Harry appeared equally curious. 

Lucius did not hesitate. One knee on the bed, he steadied Harry's arousal between two light fingers and slid it into his mouth. 

"Yes!"

That was the only sound his writhing protégé made as Lucius serviced him, sucking deeper and more hungrily than he had ever consented to do before. He followed the frantic bucking of hips, forcing all that blood-swollen flesh further into him. He closed his eyes and let the texture of ridges and silky skin pleasure the inside of his mouth. 

"Yes-" Harry hissed again, the word collapsing into a sigh as he shuddered into his climax. 

A touch at the crown of his neck told him when Harry could endure no more of the gentle pressure of his mouth. 

As Lucius stretched out on the bed, the last trace of tension had lifted from the body beside him. The weight of Harry's office had released him for now.

"You can go in the morning." Harry drew the covers over them both. "And I'll make that a decree if I have to."

He sounded contented and easy. A few minutes later, when Lucius's fingertips felt in the darkness for his mouth, he was asleep. No mere doze, it was the scarcely breathing sleep of exhaustion. 

Lucius touched the familiar contours of his cheek, his ear, his brow that rested against Lucius's shoulder. So young for this high office. So terribly capable of shouldering the load until it broke him. Lucius patiently sought out earlobes, then his lips, then his fingertips, touching the location of wounds he had once imagined he would be the one to heal. He was glad of the solitude and the darkness. 

Under his palm slept a young man who drove Lucius's cynical judgment to hyperbole. It had been worth everything to bring him to his destiny – all the minor sacrifices of the last few months and the day to come were healed by Harry's potential. The suffering of others brought him no remorse at all. Inaction would have brought greater pain – his intervention had merely distributed it differently and drawn down the blame on his own head. The taste of success was sweet. Nothing like the shame of Tom's first uprising and the disgust of his second. The principles might have been similar, but Tom had accomplished nothing to remediate all of the death and humiliation he had dealt out. It was never the cruelty that had pricked at Lucius's conscience, only the knowledge of its pointlessness. 

Lucius, after his days of leisure, only dozed as Harry scarcely stirred beside him. The phoenix came and went, bustling in her cage on the other side of the room. The night deepened and began to lift. 

He rolled up close against Harry's side – the masculine bulk of his body that still produced an instant's surprise – and drew the covers down far enough to bare the slow rise of his chest. With his arm flung over his head, he slept with his heart facing upward, unprotected. The pads of Lucius's fingers drew possessive circles, following the borders of Harry's pectorals, stroking his breast-bone. He leaned down to kiss one nipple then the other, teasing both into a soft swell. There was a quickening of breath, but no more. He let the growing heat of his erection press into Harry's hip and draw him towards consciousness.

Harry gasped, disorientated, as he woke – seized Lucius's wrist then let it go. Then, slowly in the darkness, came the familiar acceleration of breath and blood as desire crept over him. He found Lucius's hand again, drew it to his lips and guided it down. 

"Did you think about me?" he asked with a sleep-slurred tongue as Lucius unhurriedly grasped him. "Did you think about this and come?" 

Lucius could only think how colourless the fantasy of Harry would seem when he had sampled the reality. He caressed the firm curves of Harry's balls and stroked behind them. "I thought about you."

The silence was an erotic statement all of its own as Lucius summoned the lubricant pot and, for the first time, dipped his fingers into it. In the shadow-draped room, guided mostly by the murmurs and swallows in Harry's mouth, he made Harry ready. His lips caressed the illogically soft skin stretched over his ribs, and gently bit the fingers that touched his face. Muscle and bone and skin and blood. It was a small miracle that four ordinary components, fuelled by breath and bound with magic, could create so superb a creature as this young man beside him. 

Harry's legs parted and fastened around him, drawing him down, and he had the familiar sensation of bewilderment. Like this, with Harry, all of his experience deserted him, and all the world's rules were broken. Hamstrung by desire, humbled by feeling, he was not the man he imagined himself to be. 

"Lucius." He let Harry's grip around his neck bring their mouths together, and he indulged them both in the teasing heat of rubbing arousals. His hair tie slipped free in Harry's hand, white hair spilling loose. The strands slid like a fumbling paint brush over Harry's chest as he moved. Harry's thighs strained apart beneath him, and he pushed home.

Against the reawakened urgency of desire, he held back, seeking Harry's pleasure, working for the panting breath and needy grip that signalled it. Dawn was some way off, and the return of the minister's swarming concerns was farther still. He prolonged their pleasure, bending down to sink his teeth into Harry's chest and then his neck. With his hips held still, buried deep, he took Harry's shaft between finger and thumb and stroked it until it strained and dripped and Harry's head writhed on the pillow. 

"Lucius-" 

A combination of caress and command which no-one else had ever lent to his name. Lucius hastened his rhythm as Harry's hand brushed his jaw. Those magnificent eyes flickered closed. Firm hands gripped his forearms. With a soft cry, Harry surrendered himself to pleasure.

The smell and the feel of Harry's climax swept away Lucius's self-control. Hungrily, he rode the fast rhythm of pliant muscle and sweet submission that had been denied to him for these long weeks. 

Harry braced one arm against the mattress and rolled his tailbone up, legs straining a fraction wider. A gift of deeper penetration. Body and mind approaching the limits of endurance, Lucius thrust himself through those last tormented moments before his orgasm carried him away.

As he unlaced himself from the tangle of Harry's legs and sank into his back, he acknowledged the grief that bore down on him. Welcomed it, even. It was only further proof of the exceptional qualities Lucius had sensed in him.

Harry put the essence of himself so powerfully into everything they did together that it was easy to be blinded to the rest of what he was. It was the Minister for Magic whose arm curled over his waist, whose lips left a lazy kiss on the joint of his shoulder. It was Harry, and Harry held the nation in the palm of his hand. 

"What did you do to Fudge?" Harry asked into the quietness.

"Nothing whatever." Lucius allowed himself a satisfied smile. "I put in his path a Portkey. You will find him in some travesty of good taste like Margate, sheltering behind dark glasses and trying to bluster his way up to the presidential suite of a gaudy little hotel."

Harry's laugh vibrated right through his ribs, like a fleeting massage that left all his insides light. Shifting, Harry rested his forearm and his chin on Lucius's chest and made himself comfortable. 

"I knew you wouldn't kill him."

Lucius touched his cheek, a fleeting response. They lay still, but no sleep came.

Over the unruly thatch of Harry's hair, Lucius watched the first weak puddle of sunlight collecting on the far wall. 

"It's time, Harry."

Harry lurched on top of him, pinning him down and joining their mouths. Sharp limbs, unconcealed strength. But the kiss grew gentler, seeking comfort, seeking an answer. 

The potential was there – faintly palpable – for Lucius to gain control of him. Never overtly, but on spider-web strings of emotion and logic, and the giving and with-holding of himself. Harry may have learned a degree of cynicism, but there was something in his heart which remained open and could not be closed. He was waiting for an invitation to take Lucius into his trust again. 

Lucius had never intended to keep Harry for himself. If he gave in now, they would make each other weak. Harry, as long as he had Lucius's support, would never quite bear his own weight. He would never reach his full potential.

Time had taught Lucius the depth of the shadow he cast. Only his absence could give Harry the gift of freedom he had never been able to give his son. 

His silence was answer enough. With a last brush of lips, Harry let him go. 

As he encased his pale limbs in their black shell, the light grew on the opposite side of the room, illuminating the spectacular colour of the curious bird. He fastened the first hooks of his boots by hand, then finished it with an impatient spell. There was no sense in delay. The only way forward was Harry's way: to meet it head-on.

He checked the catch on the reliquary and lifted it. 

"Lucius." Harry rose from the bed and came to him, at home in his bare skin, unashamed of his carnal smell and the marks of Lucius's mouth and hands. He fixed a half-threaded button on Lucius's robe and let his hand linger. "The door's always open. You understand? Whenever you want to come back, I'll be waiting for you." 

The scoffing response would not come. The sceptical predictions about the change of heart, the lovers, the essential wife, the doting family, simply could not be voiced. He had taught Harry not to flinch from the truth. He would not make himself a coward by doing it himself. 

"Yes, Harry," he said. "I understand."

Harry's mouth was sweet and clinging; his body flexed hard under Lucius's hands. When they had wrung every last jolt of pleasure from the kiss, they released each other.

"Write to me," Lucius said, "in Switzerland. When your political views have improved, you might visit."

Harry's laugh was easy and warm. But then he had spent the best part of his young life learning to bring himself back from the very precipice of destruction.

Lucius stood in the fireplace, where Harry's wards allowed easiest apparition, the reliquary in one hand and his makeshift wand in the other. Leaning on a chair's arm and making no attempt to dress, Harry bore none of the trappings of royalty except what he carried in himself. 

Lucius was satisfied. 

"Thank you," he said.

With a few short spells, he had left Britain behind.

** 

The end


	7. Lone man by the lake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first of three glimpses into the future, after the close of the story in chapter 6.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Raitala, whose postcard inspired this scene.

The first time, recanting had hurt so much he had thought he could never do it again. 

After three days in a dark cell where the water lay two fingers deep and the slightest movement made the chains clank in a humiliating reminder of his impotence, he had been angry enough to hold out whatever the cost. Dumbledore, a disgrace of a wizard who hid behind foolhardy causes because he was too great a coward to embrace his own magic as an exceptional force in no service but its own – no, Dumbledore would never have convinced him otherwise. It had been Marchbanks, a mother herself, who had brought in Narcissa's notes, full of half-spoken pleas, and a paltry tuft of white hair with his baby's scent on it strong enough to overcome the damp metal and shame. 

He had started with Tom's excesses. Those were easy: the cowardly attacks on lone targets, and the bloody revenging of slights that should have been forgotten, and his obsession with death in place of all the magic in the living world. Since these beliefs had never been Lucius's own, it was no great stretch of the truth for him to claim he had been forced to act them out. But by the early hours of the morning, exhausted, starving, Lucius had heard his own voice denying the very principles he had lived by. He had averted his eyes from the scribe in the corner who was recording the lies he told. Magic was no more than an extra sense, no better than taste or smell or hearing. The numerical superiority of Muggles proved the advantage of their ways. Tradition was no more than habit left unchanged for too long.

As he had stood outside the Manor's gates, hands wrapped around the bars in mimicry of the cell he had just left behind, he had wondered whether he was worthy to enter them again, with his mouth still full of the shame of the words he had said. Walking through what the Aurors had left of the gardens, he had sworn to himself that he would never do it again. His son was better off with no father at all than a father who stood for nothing. 

From there had come his manner throughout the trying decade that followed, the delicate undertone of parody that informed even the least observant stranger that what he believed was the opposite of what he said, and it would only be a matter of time before he set the record straight. 

The moment for plain speaking, however, had never come. In the aftermath of Tom's final annihilation, no-one had rated Lucius's opinion highly enough to make him renounce it. In any case, in those days there had been nothing in his heart but fury – certainly nothing so noble as a principle, let alone an ideal – and if defeat had not silenced him utterly, he would have used his voice for nothing but damning Tom Riddle's name, with more venom and more precision than the bitterest of his opponents could have done.

And then, after a long period of reflection in Azkaban's mute embrace, had come Harry, reminding him how sweet the melody of the truth could be. He could have spoken his throat raw, for the pleasure of giving breath to all the things he had learned. Things unsaid grew forgotten, like a garden too long untended swallowed by brambles. Harry had listened to all of it, the quick blink behind his glasses tracking how he sifted what he approved from what he didn't, and his quiet attention had revived in Lucius the excitement that too much living had dulled.

They had lived and breathed principle, in those months of slow planning for Harry's accession. In the library, in the open air, in the bedroom, Harry had drawn him into talk of ideals, mingling the subtlety of experience with the heartfelt absolutes of youth. 

And so, his old certainties re-learnt and his spine grown straight and tall with conviction, how could Lucius have made himself bend on the question that divided them?

He could not. The toll of death and injury at Lucius's hands had been justified in one aim: seizing power over the fate of magic and putting it at Harry's feet. Every betrayal and every lie had come down to that. He could not watch Harry, in the lingering echo of Dumbledore, deny his extraordinary gifts and put the future back in the control of the faceless multitude who, every chance they were given, showed themselves unworthy.

Their parting had been set in stone from the beginning. 

Lucius pondered these matters, as he so often did, at daybreak, when his mind was most open to unorthodox thoughts and revelations. The lake beneath his grandfather's alpine retreat was glacial: still and deep and deadly. There he stood most mornings, by the water, stretching out his will to feel the distant shivers in the fabric of being as the dark world came to life, and thinking, more often than not, of Harry. 

Despite everything he knew as a certainty, he wondered if perhaps there hadn't been some way he could have stayed in England with Harry, if only he could have thought of it. 

The stairs were hardly more than notches cut onto the rock face with the occasional plank of wood for stability, but he preferred the climb to apparition. A strong body was a better conduit for strong magic.

He saw the phoenix sitting on the sill of his study long before he reached the house. 

She had lost her youthful ungainliness over the months of her master's high office, and did not lunge for a perch on his shoulder as once she might have done. When the sash was raised, she regarded him with a stately reserve befitting the Minister's personal emissary. Even when he returned from the kitchen garden with a young sprig of sage, she accepted it daintily with the tip of her beak and consumed it wish such delicacy that the tall scarlet feathers of her crest barely quivered at all. 

Her diffidence, Lucius suspected, was not entirely the result of Harry's seniority, but also something quite personally directed at him. The phoenix was a fiercely intelligent creature and, above all, loyal. 

Nonetheless, when he offered his forearm, she shifted onto it and allowed him to remove the scroll from her leg.

"An uneventful week, I take it." 

The letter was short. Harry was a better correspondent than Draco, if briefer. He had learned how to extract the essence of a thing, how to strip it of its artifice, and he rarely added a detail merely to brag of having observed it. The lean sentences bore repeated re-reading; they were in any case his only window onto Harry's life. Since the day he had turned his back on England, they had not met. 

Today's letter concerned Arthur Weasley, whose wife and daughter were using every claim they had on Harry's loyalties to get their husband and father back into an office which restored his prestige. The letter stopped short of asking for the advice which Lucius's replies resolutely refused to give, but behind the careful choice of neutral words and bare facts, it was plain to read Harry's distress at the gap between what he had already decided to do, and what he wished he could have done. 

Lucius set the phoenix down as he sat at his desk. 

The reply took some time in the crafting, to acknowledge all the reasons Harry's decision had been correct whilst stopping short of imposing Lucius's judgment in place of his own. The balance was difficult, for he had taught Harry so many of his strategies that he had very little artifice left to employ. Deep in thought, he fell to stroking the bird with the pad of one finger, a repeated line down the length of her neck where she perched on a stand meant for quills. As soon as he caught himself doing it, he stopped, but she turned her head to fix him in her sight. She had a penetrating look, her dark eye unwavering, like an examiner waiting for her student to discover his error. 

He had read, during those months of their campaign, all the literature there was to be found on the phoenix, to discover what the presence of one indicated about Harry and to ascertain how far she might go if he were put in peril. Most of the studies were highly speculative, since their fierce loyalty was reciprocated and the few witches or wizards who had been favoured with their companionship could not be persuaded to submit them to any kind of examination. Their final immolation pointedly left no mortal remains. Whether they theorised instinctive clairvoyance or legilimency or the most elemental of all magicks, with one voice the scholars agreed that the phoenix had no equal in the magical realm. 

This particular phoenix had picked the future Minister for Magic when she had been hardly more than a chick. She had seen what was extraordinary in Harry long before Lucius had given him a second thought, when bitterness and anger had hidden the great potential in him. She let him stroke the feathers over her breast with the backs of his fingers. Did Harry turn to her, he wondered, seeking counsel late at night when he pondered some dilemma of state from the day? Who else, after all, did he have? 

Lucius discarded his half-page response and on a fresh sheet wrote one sentence. From the cabinet behind him, he took a portkey he had intended to send to Draco and fastened it to the parchment. 

"There. Are you content with that?"

She watched him fasten it to her leg, reserving her judgment. But he had no more than raised the sash when she launched off his wrist and took to the air, triumphantly coloured against the washed out blue sky. 

*

It was Friday afternoon when a tremor in the wards told Lucius the portkey had been activated, hours earlier than he had expected. He laid down his quill and tucked the green ribbon marker into his book. He stopped, because he believed in small courtesies where they were merited, at the mirror on the mantelpiece to make sure that his appearance created the impression it ought to. 

He found his guest not in the entrance hall, where he expected, but in the gallery it led onto: a long, echoing arcade on the crown of the building's facade, with a row of tall arched windows in its south wall that opened onto a spectacular view over the valley and the near arm of the lake. 

Harry, with his back turned to the majestic panorama, was bent over one of the cabinets along the interior wall. In it lay a looking glass, late Roman, in highly polished bronze. It had enough magic left in it to faintly show the whereabouts of lost objects, if the incantation were spoken. He watched Harry's mouth shape the words in a murmur. Pale light reflected in his glasses as the vision came to life and then faded.

He looked stiller and less dangerous than when they had parted, and this pleased Lucius because neither impression was likely to be accurate.

"I assumed your wards weren't meant for me," Harry said. "I took them down."

He turned to where Lucius stood, straightening. 

"So I see," said Lucius. "Welcome." 

Harry nodded, nothing more.

"Would you like a drink?"

"No."

"Shall I show you around?"

"Lucius."

He was leaning back against the cabinet, waiting, letting the silence speak for him. It was one of those things Lucius had never explicitly taught him to do, a piece of Lucius's long experience that Harry had absorbed as if through his skin. Harry would surpass him in a good deal of what he learned, if Lucius did nothing to impede his progress. He had long been reconciled to that. 

As Lucius approached him, he seemed to have grown more substantial in the months they had been apart, giving the impression now of subdued muscular power to match his magic. His youth had worn away entirely; the lines of care around his eyes belonged to a statesman. Under the tie of his travelling cloak, there was a string of gold that had held the snidget feather pendant Lucius had given him long ago. 

When they were a pace apart, Harry grasped the front of his robe and forced him not to stop. 

He had often lingered in memory upon the sensation of having Harry's in his arms, but the memory had been a pallid imitation of the reality. The magical power he recalled perfectly, the immense potential in him that thrummed under Lucius's fingertips. What he had forgotten was the shifting nature of him. The sense of holding a shadow under changing light. Harry was Minister, but the trappings of authority were repugnant to him and he seemed always to be trying to shrug them off, even now as he fixed Lucius with an unflinching gaze. Somewhere in him still were traces of who he had been before: the frustrated revolutionary hungry for battle, and the injured boy who had not learned how to ask for the cure he needed. Lucius's knuckles hurt where they gripped Harry's shoulders. 

"Harry." He heard his own voice become hushed, hoarse, not at all as he'd imagined. "You have never been out of my thoughts."

Harry's gaze dropped abruptly to his jaw and clung there, his anguish apparent and unashamed. "Eight months, Lucius. Eight months."

Just off the centre of Harry's bottom lip, the pale weal which the vile Muggle device had left on him made the outline of his lip jagged. Lucius remembered how he had ached to the marrow to watch it done, and sworn to himself he would tear the whole city down brick by brick before he saw Harry put in pain again. Harry let him kiss the scar. His shaky breath came into Lucius's mouth. 

All those regret-plagued nights came back to him. For this, for Harry, could he have lessened himself to be no more than a counsellor? Could he have allowed the novice Minister his mistakes, without interfering? No. Impossible. Harry, when he gave his heart, gave it fearlessly, and could not love wisely enough to recognise it as a separate emotion from trust. And he was young, still absorbing ideas like the hungry roots of a sapling. In the end, it would have been Lucius's will he wielded, not his own – and if he had resisted, Lucius's instinct for victory would slowly have driven him to seek out stronger methods. 

It had taken a barrier of five hundred miles to preserve Harry and his fledgling government from Lucius's influence. It had torn eight months out of Lucius's life. 

"Forgive me." Next to the solidity of Harry's fist, curled against his neck, all of Lucius's convictions dispersed like dust, and he regretted every lost moment. "It was necessary. There was no other way. Forgive me." 

He felt Harry shudder in his arms. There was a great deal more that he wished to say, but the words would not come, even for Harry.

This much he could do. He unfastened the tie of Harry's cloak and let it slip from his grasp to drape over the cabinet. He used both hands to ease open the buttons down the front of Harry's robes, each one coming free like a promise. 

Then Harry's mouth was on his, reclaiming what belonged to him, reducing the unnavigable barriers between them to the simple, instant connection of flesh to flesh.

Every instinct in Lucius strove to hide the wounds that eight months' solitude had left on him, to brush them off as if they had been nothing. He did not know how to make Harry understand that his absence had plagued Lucius like a never-ending thirst, that he had become so accustomed to the quiet daily pain that he had grown numb to it until the moment Harry's mouth had brought his nerves back to life. He did not have the vocabulary to convey what a gruelling test of him it had been not to reach out and ask Harry to come to him. But he owed it to Harry to lay these things bare, if he could find a way. 

Harry's mouth sought him out, again and again, refusing him compromise or retreat. His fingers tore at the back of Lucius's robe, the Minister's fingers, which turned his will into law. This time, Lucius would make himself the student. He was ready to learn from Harry's example.

**


	8. Young man by the lake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second of three snapshots into the post-Reliquary future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Queen_Bellatrix, who wanted more from this universe.

In the middle of the morning, the lake was at its most beautiful. The chill in the air had lost its bite, and the surface of the water was still enough to invite thoughts of walking across it towards the peaks on the opposite side. The sunlight was gently unobtrusive. The patches of blue and white bellflowers that grew on the narrow flat of land between the shore and the slope shivered in the occasional breath of wind. 

The shade of the silver birch fluttered over the pages of the book in Lucius's lap. He glanced out at the lake and returned to his reading, drawing a second volume from the basket to check a contradictory reference. They were worn and battered, all the books in the basket, bearing the marks of narrow escapes all over them. The oldest volume, with the calfskin cover, came from Lucius's family, a four-hundred-year-old refugee from Ministry persecution which had spent a good deal of its life bricked up in walls or buried in spell-wrapped boxes under the fountain in the rose garden. Two of the others had been taken from him and reacquired by Harry from the archives of the Auror Office. The fourth was a recent purchase, which he had stumbled upon in an antique market near Utrecht they had gone to one leisurely summer weekend. 

About two dozen paces from the shoreline, the water finally rippled and Harry's sure strokes broke the surface, bringing him closer. Lucius released his harsh grip on the book's cover. His eardrums still ached from the two days during the week he had spent scouring the depths of the lake for any source of harm, but no matter what preparation he put in, it was impossible not to give way to some doubts when the Minister for Magic, when Harry, was out of sight and beyond his protection.

Harry spat the gillyweed into his hand as the water released him and he climbed the steep slope up onto the shore. 

The close cling of the swimming trunks to his thighs and between his legs stoked an appetite in Lucius that could wait for the comfort of the bedroom to be satisfied, but that did not stop him indulging in a little imagination now. He lingered over the wet trail of hair that began under Harry's collarbone and thickened below his navel before it disappeared. The capable girth of his shoulders held a masculine appeal to which Lucius would never have thought himself susceptible, until Harry had taught him otherwise. Harry swiped the dripping hair out of his eyes and grinned a wild and boyish grin that had been too long absent.

"It's lovely in," he said as he tugged a towel from the basket and buried his face in it. "If you don't mind feeling like your bones are being crushed by boulders."

Despite the armour of both his charms and Lucius's, he had stayed in much longer than intended and his skin had gone an unhealthy white with cold. He shivered slightly as he looked around for his wand. Lucius found his first and cast the spell he needed, which made Harry's eyes fall closed in pleasure and drew a groan from him that Lucius knew from the bedroom.

"Thanks." 

He threw the towel down by Lucius's side and sat on it. Sprawled on it, in fact, dispensing completely with the dignity his office ought to have demanded. Today, he could have been any young man making the most of the weather. There was nothing about him to suggest that tomorrow he would take the fate of his country back into his hands, and that was exactly how Lucius had come to prefer him. 

Lucius kissed his bare shoulder, the skin still cool under his mouth, and shifted his book to leave his thigh free for Harry's head. 

"The eels were out," Harry said as he settled himself. "Three of them, deep down. Or it could have been two moving quickly. They were in the shadow of the rock spur, otherwise I wouldn't have seen their light at all."

His wet hair was already making a dark halo on Lucius's robe; his eyes were all the more arresting without his glasses. 

"What a shame you were born a thousand years too late. In the Founders' day, any ambitious leader would have had a lunar eel in his collection."

"No wonder there's not many of them left then." Harry arched his back and wriggled into a more comfortable position. "What did they keep them for? Not just for show, I hope. It was the moonlight, was it?"

They would not talk of Harry's other life on these weekends, when he left the Ministry five hundred miles away. Their talk would be of magic. Or nothing. There was a great deal of silence between them; Harry's other world was all too full of words. It should have been strange that politics, the very subject that had drawn them together, had become their one taboo, but it was for the best. When he wanted advice, he brought Lucius to London to give it. When he needed to lay down the burdens of his office, he came here, at the end of his endurance, and Lucius found new ways to help him regather himself. 

"Yes," Lucius answered. "The moonlight. A number of powerful potions need to be steeped in it for one night at least. As you can imagine, no wizard likes to be dependent upon the vagaries of the weather, and the recycled light from the eel's skeleton is almost as potent as the original source. It's commonly accepted that the first Goblin War would have gone the other way if not for the lunar eel and a particularly benign winter."

Harry grinned. "And I suppose that was a coincidence, was it, the winter?"

"I suggest we save weather magic for an occasion when you are more suitably prepared for study."

Lucius ran his fingers up Harry's breastbone in time to catch the last vibrations of his laugh, and settled his hand lightly over Harry's throat. They fell into silence.

Some weeks, Harry came here so exhausted by the endless daily battles of his office that Lucius regretted what he had done to put him there. When they had first crossed paths, united in anger at the slow death of magic in the hands of the Fudge Ministry, Lucius could have turned him away to continue his life of self-indulgence and destructive discontent. Even afterwards, he could have left Harry out of his revolution and spared him all of this. Instead, he had manipulated Harry's instinct for service and sacrificed his peace of mind for a country that had done nothing to show itself worthy of him, not then and not now. 

Regret was a futile emotion, unacceptable to a man of Lucius's disposition. Last year, he had acquired a number of vials from a merchant in Xian, which he had placed in a mother-of-pearl snuffbox in the hidden compartment in the bottom drawer of his desk, unwarded so as not to attract attention. After his own meticulous additions, each dose had been calibrated to impart a specific degree of forgetfulness. With delicate application, in the course of a day he could take the Ministry of Magic away from Harry entirely, and permanently. He could erase the last two years – or more; he had sometimes considered it kinder to go further back until Britain itself was hardly more than a dream. Nobody else, apart from Draco, knew where Lucius had made his home, and Harry had been secretive about the reason for his weekend absences. They would never find him. Lucius could keep him here, contented and safe, to live out his youth as he ought to have been able to, free from the toll of other people's troubles. Stripped of his responsibilities, he would still be Harry in his essence. 

"I brought you something," Harry said, dipping in the pocket of his trunks. "It was in the water."

He pulled out what looked like a ruby, a little bigger than his fingernail. The light fell eerily on it, leaving a solid shadow with none of the colour or diffusion the eye would have expected. 

"Illusory, I'm afraid," Lucius told him. "There are colonies of leprechaun mussels scattered around the lake. They have a fascinating defence mechanism to compensate for their unusually fragile shells. When a keen fisherman stumbles across them, they eject a highly effective distraction, rubies and pearls are common. The illusion only needs to create a momentary diversion while they loose their grip and let the current carry them to a safer location. By tomorrow, your ruby will be nothing more than crumbs of rock."

Harry examined it, his expression bright as he held it closer and further away to improve his focus. That much had not changed since the first surprising night of their reacquaintance. Lucius took pleasure in sharing his knowledge, and Harry's mind never tired of learning when it was something he could use, or practise, or hold in his hand. No matter how many times Lucius expected to strike the limits of Harry's curiosity for magic, he never had. 

"And Harry?"

He let the false gem roll off his palm and into the grass. "Hmmm?"

"Next time you come across an intriguing magical object of unknown origin, don't pick it up and put it in your pocket. You're too important to risk your life on a trifle." 

Harry's mouth twisted bitterly. His languor became tension in a moment, all the day's good work undone.

"How selfish of me. For a moment there I thought I was a real person and not the Minister for fucking Magic."

His burdens were never far away from him. He would have to go on bearing them, with whatever help Lucius could give. There had been a rainy afternoon, some weeks ago, when they had taken to the duelling piste, where Lucius's experience gave him a marginal advantage over Harry's remarkable resilience and power. They had been concentrating on banishing charms, and Harry had picked himself up dozens of times already from whichever of the walls he had been hurled against when, finally, he had penetrated Lucius's defences with a quick succession of spells. On his face, as he jogged over to make sure no damage was done, had been a look of elemental joy, born of his repeated losses as much as the single victory. After all, it had been in adversity, not triumph, that he had shaken Lucius out of his indifference and restored his ideals to him. That same evening, Lucius had emptied the snuffbox and thrown its contents into the fire. 

"When I ask you to take care of yourself, Harry, I am not asking on behalf of your constituents." 

If it came out a little harder than Lucius intended, it was only because nothing wracked him like the reminder that the most ingenious web of protective magic – all the draughts and charms and tricks and black incantations Lucius knew – could not eliminate the unthinkable possibility of Harry coming to harm. Lucius took a slow breath. "I like to think I've earned the right to ask on my own behalf."

Just like that, Harry was still again, his anger quelled. He drew Lucius's fingers against his cheek, and held them there a while, and let them go. Lucius recognised the signs of contentment on him. 

Harry rolled away, out of the dappled shadow to where the sunlight fell across his back, and he stretched out. The backs of his calves were patterned where the grass had pressed into them, and a crushed white bellflower had got caught in his drying hair. 

"Read to me," he said, eyes closed, pleased and unhurried. "It doesn't matter what."

Lucius did.

**


	9. The unexpected diplomat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last of three glimpses into the post-Reliquary future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For ura_hd, who asked for more from this universe.

Harry straightened the papers he had brought with him, mostly for the momentary delay.

"Of course I can make sure that no-one in the Ministry interferes. But the magical community will need to be reassured that the records have all been destroyed. It's the only way, unfortunately, to prevent any dissatisfied wizards from taking matters into their own hands."

The Prime Minister's hard road to office would have left him little time to develop a detailed interest in the magical world, but he was a clever man, slow to make presumptions, with a methodical eye for his briefing papers, and Harry had already concluded that very little advantage could be gained from his newness in the role. 

"And you and your Ministry will keep them under control, I don't doubt it for a second. You're something of a phenomenon, they tell me. Ten years and still whipping up the sort of popularity most of us can only dream about. You must come to dinner so I can find out your secret." 

A touch of professional charm, made palatable because he did it with such a convincing lack of guile. A good man who had no need to feign virtue, he was better than his predecessor, and more dangerous. 

"In any case, you can tell your community in all honesty that no official records of will ever be made publicly available. The last copies are kept under the strictest security – the Ministry of Defence and my personal office, and nowhere in the country is under tighter protection than that. Your people will be officially invisible, Minister, or as good as."

The luxury of an hour in the prime ministerial office, completely unaccompanied, unguarded and off the record, was evidence of the esteem in which Harry's Ministry was still held, even now that he was cutting it off from the Muggle world, but if Harry hardly noticed the decade-plus gap between them, the prime minister, subtly, did. There was not quite condescension, but certainly complacency, in his dealings with Harry.

With a flicker of his little finger, Harry summoned an antique shilling from the cabinet, making the glass part around it. "Do you mind?" he asked as it flew into his palm and, behind his warm hospitality, the prime minister grew watchful. "Take trade, for example. It's always had a black market. No leader has ever eliminated it, even in the days when there were no elections to get in the way." He turned the coin over, slowly hiding the king's face. "It's the same with magic. There's only so much I can do to control tens of thousands of witches and wizards. The temptation has to be removed. Otherwise you'll need a magical guard around the clock for as long as you keep the papers."

"Then we'll find a way to do it," said the Prime Minister in a new voice that told Harry there would be no more unaccompanied meetings and no question of deleting the last official records of magical Britain.

Harry had held office long enough to take the occasional setback in his stride. "I appreciate that, Prime Minister. Now if you don't mind, I've brought along a proposal from our magical enforcement office. A few changes to the protocol on early signs of magic."

There was nothing to be done but put it off to another occasion, and in the meantime he would have the bother of coming up with a substantial threat or inducement to barter with when he returned. For the moment, as they went through the protocol for filtering magical prodigies away from the ham-fisted discipline of the social welfare and education bureaucracies, he put it aside.

They had got to page eleven when a knock was followed by the entrance of a slightly blank looking aide.

"Visitor, Prime Minister," she said, leaving the door open as she trailed out.

Magic warmed in Harry's fingertips, instinctively ready to defend them both if needed. But what strode into the office was anything but a threat. 

"Lucius Malfoy, Prime Minister. A great pleasure to see you again."

The Prime Minister gripped Lucius's hand with both of his, a little too long. 

"The Hague," Lucius smiled understandingly, occupying a free chair. "Last winter, the week of that dreadful summit. The ambassador was run off his feet, and so as I recall were you."

"Of course." 

"Lucius."

"Minister. If the interruption is unwelcome, please say so. I assume your business has already been resolved."

His vigour required an adjustment after the inch-by-inch diplomacy of the previous discussion. Over the coffee table, the Prime Minister scrutinised the newcomer with unusually transparent perplexity, making Harry wonder how he saw Lucius, in his tailored robes as sober as the severest suit on Savile Row, white hair tied back to emphasise all the grave angles of his face. The Prime Minister's fingers, which throughout their interview had been calmly upturned, now clutched the arms of his seat.

"Not quite resolved," Harry said.

"Then allow me to assist."

A second too late, Harry identified the Prime Minister's symptoms. Imperius, lightly cast during the confusion of Lucius's abrupt entry, and strengthened through the long handshake. A tactic so outrageous that Harry had not thought to look for it. 

"It is the question of documentary records, I imagine, which has proved most contentious." Lucius turned back to the Prime Minister, unwavering eye contact, a hint of intimacy in the voice. No doubt the Prime Minister thought he was being unexpectedly seduced, when in fact he was being far more than that. "And as you have no doubt concluded, the perfect solution will be for the Ministry to take custody of all records – under security measures far superior to the best your experts can dream of. Naturally, they will be available for inspection at your convenience."

Behind the bright efficiency of Lucius's words, the effort at work was evident – tension in his neck and jaw, swift, shallow breathing. For the effect to outlast the curse, Lucius's conclusions needed to be deeply rooted in memory, as unquestionable in the Prime Minister's sub-conscious as the order of the alphabet or the route from Downing Street to Parliament. On any lesser matter, Harry might have intervened, but he had first-hand experience of the Ministry of Defence, or part of it, and this of all institutions was not to be trusted with the secrets of the magical world. 

The Prime Minister nodded, recovering his easy composure. "Certainly."

"And I should be grateful for a list of the departments and personnel who have had access to those records."

"Of course."

No doubt Lucius, or someone who enjoyed his confidence, would mark off the names on that list at a later date, administering memory charms as they went.

"As you said, Minister, all happily resolved. A pleasure, Prime Minister. Thank you for the invitation."

A short while later, with the freshly printed list in his pocket, Lucius parted from the Prime Minister on a handshake that, once more, seemed longer than was strictly necessary. The loosening of the spell did not require close contact. But Harry knew better than anyone the qualities that Lucius appreciated in a man.

*

"St Jakob a bit cold this time of year, is it?"

A long coat masking his robes in the Muggle street, Lucius was waiting for him outside. "Your last letter sought my advice. It made no stipulation against delivering it in person."

He fell into step beside Harry, making for the underground station and the emergency door that concealed a Floo point.

"Next time I'll remember to be more specific." He had rarely seen Lucius look chastened, and certainly did not expect to see it now, when the end he had just achieved was the one they both wanted. "Thank you." 

At the pedestrian crossing, the oncoming school group parted around them – that could have been more illicit magic at work, or simply Lucius's frosty air of command. Harry's grip shifted on the handle of his case.

"How long will you stay?"

"A week. Perhaps a little longer."

They passed by ticket gates and through the door. 

"Shall I expect you tonight?" Harry asked casually, just as Lucius was stepping into the Floo. 

"Come to Wiltshire. The orchard will be exquisite." Lucius' s thumb brushed his cheek, fleetingly, and the stern corners of his mouth quirked. "Not that I intend to bore you with outdoor scenery."

The puff of smoke swallowed him up. 

Emerging back in the heart of the Ministry, Harry found himself looking forward to a brisk afternoon of work. His step was easier. The burdens of his office felt lighter. 

*

Greeting Harry at the fireplace in the entrance hall, Malfoy already seemed sullen, most likely the result of having his undisputed mastery of the house overturned again by Lucius's breezy arrival. On previous visits, Lucius had obliviously provoked his son to the point of outright hostility by straightening a painting here, re-angling a vase there, until Harry had needed to take him aside and remind him that even implicit criticism could be tempered with something positive. 

In the library, the blond infant girl and the boy with blunt Crabbe features were milling around their mother's legs, keeping well clear of their formidable guest, who was seated at the writing desk that had once been his own. 

"Won't you come through to the dining room?" Malfoy barely slowed his stride to speak. "Ursula, haven't you offered my father a drink?"

"I declined," Lucius informed him without looking up.

She picked up the little girl, liberated by his return from the ordeal of entertaining her father-in-law. As she went after him, her free hand tucked away strands of hair escaped from her chignon. "Would you like something, darling? Let me fix you a glass of Ogdens."

She was a good deal younger than her husband and her awe of him and his home showed in the nervous pause before her questions, put like a stage actress who had not quite learned her lines yet. Malfoy stopped long enough to wipe a smear off the child's chin and soften the irritation in his voice. "Thank you."

Her smile followed him down the hall. 

Lucius was glaring at the pages of a thickly bound book as if its contents were not only wrong but personally insulting. He always held himself stiffly in the house he had passed on to his son – it was one of the very few times Harry saw him without his usual habit of effortless confidence. Since they discussed it rarely, and never with real frankness, Harry could only put it down to a lingering suspicion that Lucius felt he had failed somehow in fatherhood.

The boy, attempting with audible frustration to pull the lace collar off his little blue velvet jacket, was too young to notice anything. Harry slid his hand down the side of Lucius's neck, coming to rest inside his collar over the faint thud of heartbeat.

Lucius closed the book. "This one is rather an improvement." 

Harry found he very much did not wish to discuss the Prime Minister. "A little old for you," he said, sharp with the unexpected wrench of jealousy. "And devoted to his wife. You had better not think about it."

Lucius's jaw shifted as if he were smiling. "He has integrity, that much anyone can see. And a first-rate intellect." Lucius touched his hand and instantly he felt it, the first tickle in his mind of the Imperius. The offer of ease in return for surrender. When Lucius leaned his head back, the meeting of their eyes tugged like an anchor at his resistance, dragging him down. The pull grew stronger still, reaching into the blind depths of consciousness where the impulses lurked that made him breathe or shiver or roll over in his sleep. Ending the struggle was as easy as letting go. But as he had learned to do, Harry pictured a set of thick oak doors and held onto the image until he could feel the chill of the iron handles under his palm. He slammed them shut, flinging Lucius out of his head. 

Harry uncurled his fingers where they dug into flesh. The little boy had gone quiet, leaving only the quick breath of their exertion. Lucius concluded, "And that is all he has." 

When Lucius had drilled him, in the first year of his ministry, in resisting the obscure dark spells which very few remembered how to cast, Harry had taken it to be both a cautious necessity and an oblique promise that his leadership would be free from covert interference. It occurred to him only now, with Lucius's hand firmly clasped around his own, that Lucius might have done it for nothing more than the pleasure of watching him learn. 

*

When the meal was done, Harry left father and son to linger over drinks, and sought out the summer house by the Japanese garden where Lucius's trunk was already stowed. Malfoy's meticulous house elf had lit the lamps, turned back the covers and laid out two sets of towels on the table at the foot of the bed. The hangings on the east and south windows were drawn back the way he liked them, to let in the morning light and the view over the pond. 

Family was paramount in Lucius's life and, now that he had regained his, he looked after it with the same distant guardianship he extended to Harry's government. Infrequent visits, lightly offered advice, and a protective hand in moments of peril. Although Harry's house held everything that he needed for the days or weeks of his visits, Harry liked to meet him here, where the library and the bedroom were furnished with memories of the rushed months when, alongside his perilous climb to power, he had thrown everything he had into making Lucius Malfoy believe in him, and succeeded. 

By the time the door opened, he was waiting with the covers drawn up to his bare chest. He had seen Lucius drunk only rarely, in St Jakob, after long evenings of slow diversion in the sanctuary of his secluded alpine home. He was certainly far from it now, as his boots unlaced themselves and the key turned in the door behind him. Harry watched him undress. It was both a blessing and a curse that it was a sight denied to him so many nights of the year.

Lucius was fifty-eight and coming into even greater heights of magic, as all the great wizards did, in his maturity. In his training room full of lightning rods and cannonballs and tall windows showing the peaks outside, he took to the duelling piste with an intensity of power and an intuition for the subtle currents of magic that overwhelmed Harry again and again. He exercised his wand arm every morning and every evening before he ate, and showed himself no mercy. Magic was like a second lover, whom he could not go a day without, and yes, there were times when Harry gave way to envy. But now, as Lucius shed his clothes and loosened his hair, Harry could only give thanks for the long-gone day when a bitter, unhappy young man had bought an old enemy a drink, for no better reason than mischief, and changed the course of far more lives than theirs.

Sending his robes with a flick of his fingers into the closet, Lucius extinguished two of the lights. It was no longer the moment when their lips first joined that brought Harry's heart into his mouth. It wasn't even the first covetous grasp of Lucius's hand on his bicep or his thigh, although he called on the memory of both these moments frequently to enliven deadlocked meetings and solitary nights. No, what still never failed to steal Harry's breath away was the look Lucius wore right now, as he strode across the room wearing nothing but the history on his skin. 

His eyes said that he had one all-consuming goal, and Harry was it, and always would be.

Harry pulled back the covers for him and welcomed him into his arms.

**

end


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